[rob74]

For my part, I hate anything explicitly labeled "disposable". As the author writes, you're supposed to recycle it, but how many people will do that if it has "disposable" written on it? Even worse, if it was truly disposable they could use a non-rechargeable battery, but because they have to keep up the pretense of it being reusable, they have to include a rechargeable battery with more dodgy chemistry that probably shouldn't end up in a landfill...

[csomar]

> As the author writes, you're supposed to recycle it, but how many people will do that if it has "disposable" written on it?

You need to offer an incentive (ie: discount on new vape if you recycle) and then, from my experience, most people will recycle.

[kotaKat]

I concur on this one.

Here in NY as a cannabis user, one of the brands available that offers vapes (Fernway) offers a recycling program at dispensaries. I get 10% back off my next vape/cart if I return the old one to the recycling dropbox. My dispensary also keeps how many I've returned on file if I return extras, so I keep a 'balance' of disposables returned for the discounts.

[TeMPOraL]

And you also need to refrain from breaking this scheme entirely, by introducing silly restrictions like only exchanging for in-store vouchers instead of cash, or demanding same-store receipt for original purchase (or equivalent) - like it happened in some places (e.g. my country, Poland) to glass and aluminum recycling.

Such restrictions seem to purposefully target poor people, and I have rather strong ethical objections to them (something about making a problem invisible and hoping it'll go away - or starve out), but the effect goes beyond that. Getting $20 back on a $200 product would be a different story, but here, it's more like $2 on $20, or $0.2 on $2; most people aren't going to bother with that (and understandably so: it's not worth the logistics overhead). So at best, all this does is redirect money stream from poor people to recycling companies. More typically, it just makes people recycle less.

[adrianN]

To make matters worse, recycling is a scam (with a small handful of exceptions).

[rjh29]

Varies widely across country and the type of thing you're recycling. People are so extreme with recycling, it's either "recycle everything!" or "it's a scam, just chuck it all in the garbage"

[adrianN]

I’m relatively sure that electronics are not recycled properly anywhere. At best some of the metals are extracted (hopefully not by mixing the ashes with mercury).

[Fargren]

What would be properly recycling electronics, if not extracting the metals? should the worthless based board to be melted and used for bottles?

[adrianN]

Not burning all the ICs and all the other components that still work perfectly fine would be a good start imo.

[Fargren]

That would fall under Reuse rather than Recycle. Reduce, Reuse and Recycle are in the order of best to worst. Recycling is the last ditch effort to not completely waste something. It's always going to feel like a half measure, because it is.

[shibapuppie]

To do WHAT with? Catalog and categorize the millions of random penny-priced ICs that MIGHT be usable for something else?

[sejje]

Isn't that the point of recycling? To reuse the reusable materials like plastic?

[Fargren]

If salvaging 100% of the materials that make up something is the only way to "properly" recycle, we are not recycling anything properly. Some components are not recyclable.

I won't speculate about whether the plastic on the board is recyclable, or ecological to recycle. I don't know. This is what I'm asking.

[1234letshaveatw]

what about best buy and staples? that's where I take mine

[roadside_picnic]

I can't tell if this is a tongue-in-cheek comment or not, but all of that is shipped off to 3rd party "recyclers" who pinky promise that they will dispose of it properly. Very often those 3rd parties rely on other 3rd parties until the it ends up in a waste pile in a developing country, but with a long enough chain of differed responsibility that nobody can be held accountable.

The fundamental problem with "recycling" is precisely the fact that we just hand it off and don't ask questions about where it ends up, all while feeling great about ourselves afterwards. Bestbuy and Staples are offering accountability laundering so that you don't have to feel bad and in exchange are more likely to become a customer. The 3rd parties working for them do the same thing, but they usually want cash for it.

[1234letshaveatw]

sounds like cynicism without any factual basis. I just checked and ERI says otherwise: https://eridirect.com/blog/2025/01/rare-earth-metal-recovery...

[roadside_picnic]

> "it's a scam, just chuck it all in the garbage"

This sentiment is the case because very often that's where recycling ultimately ends, we just pay someone to move it far away from us so we don't have to see it when it happens.

Until 2018, when they finally stopped accepting it, one of the US largest exports to China was cardboard boxes sent over for "recycling". We burned tons of bunker fuel shipping back the boxes Chinese goods arrived in. The net environmental impact would likely have been less had we just kept the boxes at home.

It's strange to me how often people prefer a widely acknowledged lie than to simply admit the truth.

I always recycle though because the recycle bin in my city is larger than my trash bin, and I don't have enough room in my trash bin sometimes.

[vasco]

It varies very widely indeed. In some countries it isn't a scam because it gets burned like Denmark but other than that majority of recycling just means shipping it to a landfill in a poor country that they promise to recycle.

[eru]

Well, it depends a lot on material.

Metals, especially aluminum, get widely recycled because it actually makes financial sense.

Plastics, well, you are probably better off burning them for electricity.

[chpatrick]

In Hungary it gets sorted out locally. We also recently implemented a bottle return system that (although it's annoying) produces clean stacks of PET, aluminium and glass, all of which are recyclable.

[mikkupikku]

Even with PET, arguably the most recyclable plastic, most of it doesn't go bottle-to-bottle but rather bottle-to-textile. Because most PET "recycling" doesn't close the loop, so it's dubious to even call it recycling. That said, some bottle-to-bottle recycling of PET is done, and this has been getting better.

[nandomrumber]

> because it gets burned

I wouldn’t really call that recycling.

[johannes1234321]

As long as the heat is used for something (electricity, building heating etc.) there is at least some reuse of parts of it. And if exhaust ist filtered pollution is also limited. Better than just putting it on a garbage dump and forgetting about it.

But yes, not proper recycling.

[setopt]

Depends, it’s hard to make a blanket statement like that. Recycled steel and aluminum for example is absolutely not a scam. But for plastics, I agree that waste incineration is mostly a better solution than recycling (which produces low-quality plastics with some risk of unhealthy contaminants in the few cases that it’s not actually a scam).

[stmL]

Can you elaborate on that?

Edit: I'm actually curious l, i don't know how recycling supposed to work for electronics and how it can be a scam.

[mngnt]

This youtube video explains why plastic recycling exists, how it's mostly ineffective and why is it a scam created to normalize one-use plastic. This basically applies to electronics and others. "Why would I reuse or reduce, I can buy, consume an recycle".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJnJ8mK3Q3g

[sofixa]

wildly country dependent, e.g. check the stats for the EU: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/d...

[pbhjpbhj]

Tax CEOs of vape companies the percentage of their vapes that their company doesn't physically retrieve from customers to be recycled ...

[DaSHacka]

A completely ridiculous and nonsensical proposal I can only assume was said in jest.

[GuinansEyebrows]

Hey, if your entire business plan is to produce actual garbage, maybe you should be held responsible for making sure that garbage has a pathway to proper disposal.

[pbhjpbhj]

Yes, a jest. But essentially you have to directly impact the take home pay off CEOs as that appears to be the only thing they will change their behaviour for.

[Dylan16807]

It sounds like a description of most of a deposit system to me, and deposit systems are good at encouraging recycling.

[eru]

Why recycle things that you can make them cheaper, with less resources and in higher quality from scratch?

(The above is not so much about processors, but about plastics. As long as we are still burning any fossil fuels at all, we are probably better off holding off on recycling and instead burning the plastic for electricity to use ever so slightly less new fossil fuels for power, and instead use the virgin fossil fuels to make new plastics.

Especially considering the extra logistics and quality degradation that recycling entails.

Directly re-using plastic bottles a few times might still be worth it, though.)

[pbhjpbhj]

Is that a genuine question, or are you parodying an ignorant point of view?

The World has limited resources, we don't have a spare.

Do you need it spelling out more clearly?

[eru]

We are sitting on 5,970,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kg ball of matter. We have a giant nuclear furnace in the centre of the solar system that's providing us with energy.

[slow_typist]

Some resources are still scarce. And a lot of those 6E24 kg is iron and nickel we can never get to. Another big fraction is basically molten stone. And we really should stop putting more carbon into the atmosphere.

Also, if you go for measures like mass processed, the weight of microchips, pcbs, parts is only a tiny fraction of what has to be processed and build in the supply chain.

Agreed that it is smarter to use oil for plastics then to burn it directly.

[eru]

> Agreed that it is smarter to use oil for plastics then to burn it directly.

My argument is that as long as we are still burning oil and gas, we might as well burn old plastic instead of new oil and gas.

If/when we stop burning oil and gas, then we can think more seriously about recycling plastic.

[M95D]

Did you ever try to burn plastic?

1) Plastic is not liquid, so you can't pipe it to a gas or oil power plant. You may argue that coal isn't liquid either, but continue reading...

2) Burning plastic generates toxic fumes.

3) Plastic ash is sticky and very difficult to clean.

[spacebanana7]

That sounds like an almost Malthusian viewpoint.

The world has effectively infinite resources, getting more is usually just a matter of figuring out better extraction techniques or using better energy.

[tzs]

The world only has effectively infinite resources if growth slows down, because exponentials get out of hand surprisingly quickly.

For example at 1% energy growth per year it would only take around 9-10k years before to reach an annual consumption equal to all the energy in the Milky Way galaxy. By "all the energy" I don't just mean consuming all the solar energy from all the stars, and using all the fissionable material in reactors, and fusing everything that can fuse, and burning all the burnable stuff. No, I mean also using all the gravitational potential energy in the galaxy, and somehow turning everything that has mass into energy according to E=mc^2.

From there at 1% annual growth it is only another 2-3k years to using all the energy in the whole observable universe annually.

Population at 1% growth also gets out of hand surprisingly quickly. If we don't get FTL travel then in about 12k years we run out space. That's because in 12k years with no FTL we can only expand into a spherical region of space 12k lightyears in radius. At 1% annual growth from the current population in 12k years the volume of humans would be more than fits in the sphere--and that's assuming we can pack humans so there is no wasted space.

We actually have population growth under 1% now, down to around 0.85%, but that only gets us another 2-3k years.

[eru]

Eh, because the speed of light is finite, our growth in resource usage will have to 'slow down' to cubic after a while. Sure.

We are very far from that.

[pbhjpbhj]

>effectively infinite resources

Sure, like effectively infinite atmospheric carbon sink, effectively infinite Helium, effectively infinite fresh water, effectively infinite trees ... we've treated these things as true, because the World is big and population of humans wasn't so big we've got away with that for a time, now those presumptions are coming to bite us, hard.

Yes, we can work our way out of some holes, maybe all of them. But we have to make things sustainable first, then spend those resources. We're not wizards, deus ex machina only reliably happens in movies.

A little Malthusian.

[volemo]

> Directly re-using plastic bottles a few times might still be worth it, though.

Directly reusing plastic bottles that were not meant to be is bad for your health though, isn't it?

[vel0city]

The biggest risks are that single-use bottles are usually pretty difficult to clean (usually a narrow opening). The second biggest, which is related, is that those single-use bottles usually aren't very rigid and will tend to make small cracks in the surface as the material flexes which makes things even harder to clean. After that, all the cracks that will develop will mean it'll leach out the bad stuff in the plastics far faster than if you had some other kind of water bottle.

If you just opened it and drank the drink in it, there's probably no harm in filling it soon after and using it a few times like that. Using that same disposable bottle for a few months is probably not a good idea.

[amelius]

Let's start by pricing in the negative externalities.

[pixl97]

>they could use a non-rechargeable battery

The problem here is the item lasts 'long enough' that they can't, a single battery, unless it were very large would drain charge first.

But that brings in the second issue of the device not being refillable, which may be the bigger sin.