For these devices the microcontroller needs to be super cheap. Microcontrollers like the Puya PY32 Series (e.g., PY32C642, PY32F002/F030) can cost in the $0.02 - $0.05 range for the kind of many-million volumes applicable for disposable vapes. These are 32-bit ARM Cortex M0 MCUs, running at a 24 MHz clock or similar, some with 24 KB of ROM and maybe 3 KB of RAM!
To put into context: this is 3x the ROM/RAM of the ZX81 home computer of the early 1980s. The ARM M0 processor does full 32-bit multiplication in hardware, versus the Z80 that doesn't even offer an 8-bit multiply instruction. If we look at some BASIC code doing soft-float computation, as was most common at the time, the execution speed is about 3 orders of magnitude faster, while the cost of the processor is 2 - 3 orders of magnitudes less. What an amazing time we live in!
Many countries have deposits for single use bottles/cans but an electronic device with a lipo battery is seen as perfectly fine to throw away.
These things should have 100 times the deposit amount of a can of soda with mandatory requirements for retailers to take the 'empties' back.
Why stop there? I think more or less every non-durable product manufacturer (say, lifespan less than 5 years) should be required to take the product back at end of life and dispose of it properly. Trash is an enormous externality. I'm talking about plastic clamshells, container lids, "disposable" storage containers, the lot.
"Why stop there" is often a reason why nothing gets done. Why do small if you can go big right away? Because going big right away is costly (in social cost, in convincing, in how much people need to change behavior, ...) and that prevents people from doing it in the first place because the threshold is high. Apathy is the result. Better to take a small step first, then get used to the measure / the cost, then have a next phase where you do more.
Everybody makes fun of paper straws. Or they made fun of wind power when it was barely 0.1% of energy production. Why not immediately demand 20 years ago that all single use plastic is banned? Or that only wind and solar are allowed? Because the step is too big, it would not be accepted. You need to take one step at a time.
That's even a viable strategy against procrastination. There is this big daunting task. So much to do! Oh my, better scroll a little tiktok first. No, just take a small first step of the task. Very small, no big commitment. Then maybe do some tiktok, but the little first step won't be too much. Result is, you have an immediate sense of accomplishment and actually made progress, maybe even stay hooked with more steps of the ultimately big task.
> Why do small if you can go big right away?
You're missing the fact that this sort of infrastructure requires a robust business case. That's why scale is critical.
Recycling bottles and cans has a solid business case. Glass and aluminium are straight forward to recycle at an industrial scale, but would be pointless if they were kept at an artisanal scale.
Any moralistic argument is pointless if you can't put together a coherent business plan. The people you need to work and the energy you need to spend to gather and process whatever you want to process needs to come from somewhere. How many vape pens do you need to recycle per month to support employing a single person? Guilt trips from random people online don't pay that person's rent, do they?
> Everybody makes fun of paper straws.
This is specious reasoning. The core issue are tradeoffs, and what you have to tolerate or abdicate. Paper straws are a red herring because the main criticism was that, at the start, they failed to work as straws. So you were left with an industrial demand to produce a product that failed to work and was still disposable.
If you look at food packaging and containers, you are faced with more thought-provoking tradeoffs. Paper containers don't help preserve food as well as plastic ones. Packaging deteriorates if exposed to any form of moisture, and contaminates food so quickly tk the point you can taste cardboard if you leave them overnight. This leads to shorter shelf life and more food waste. Is food waste not an ecological problem? How do you manage those tradeoffs?
In theory plastic food 'waste' could be far more recyclable if it were standardized on plastics that were recyclable and we had a deposit system.
Needless to say the food and drink industry has spent an epic fuckton on lobbying to ensure that doesn't happen. Remember to give a proper fuck you to the Coca-cola corp about this.
> Everybody makes fun of paper straws.
Yeah, because they suck. Uh, pun not intended. Paper straws get somewhat soggy and feel bad in your mouth. They are inferior to the plastic straws they purport to replace, so people resist them as much as they can.
If you want to actually make a difference with an environmental effort, you need to make something superior. Nobody makes fun of LED light bulbs because (up front cost aside) they are wildly superior to incandescent. People actually like having LED bulbs and seek them out. The same cannot be said, and likely never will be said, of paper straws.
Thanks just the dystopian news I needed today.
What a stupid joke.
> Plastic ones are almost 100% recyclable
Nope, that's a myth. Plastic is essentially unrecyclable. Some types of plastic can be made into "lower" quality types with lots of effort, but there is no circular reuse. The oil and plastic industries want to make you believe that this is all a solved problem, but it very much is not.
In contrast, paper and wood products just rot away at the end of their life, and a new tree grows in their place.
> Are we saying that we are okay to cut trees to make straws when we could make them out of petroleum ?
It’s more okay to make things out of paper than plastic, yes. Plastic waste and microplastics are a huge problem. Trees are a renewable resource.
> Moreover, paper straws are not even recyclable due to water content which makes them soggy. Plastic ones are almost 100% recyclable
Plastic straws are almost never (literally never?) recycled. Paper straws are supposed to be fully biodegradable.
> Most importantly, unlike plastic straws, they are laced with glue and other chemicals which gets ingested.
But yes, this and the usability issue make the other points moot (n.b. leaching harmful chemicals is a concern that also applies to plastic straws and paper cups). The vast majority of existing straws should be replaced with no straw, and most beyond that with reusable straws.
Isn't this a bit like "paper" cups for coffee / water? We switched to these at work a few years ago, and it's an all-round horrible experience.
I swear every other one leaks right away, and those that don't can only be refilled once or twice before they do. So you end up going through like 10 of those a day. I also don't know how "eco-friendly" they actually are, since there's a picture of a dead turtle on them under a text to the effect of "don't throw out in nature".
I guess on the plus-side, our company at least provides ceramic cups to their internal employees. But since it's the employees' responsibility to clean them, not everybody is off the disposable cup train.
> Are we saying that we are okay to cut trees to make straws when we could make them out of petroleum ?
Uhh.. yes? Trees can be grown, just like any agriculture product.
> Plastic ones are almost 100% recyclable
In theory. However that rarely works out in practice, due to the complications of mixing various types of plastic in a single stream of garbage.
> Most importantly, unlike plastic straws, they are laced with glue and other chemicals which gets ingested.
The glue for paper straws will be a biodegradable water-based adhesive. It may be finished with natural wax. And that's it. I think you are intentionally spreading FUD saying glue and chemicals.
That being said, I hate paper straws. I like bamboo straws though.
Soggy is not a problem.Recycling paper involves wetting it to loose the fibres and then reforming it. It's how paper is made.
The frequencies that they claim affect them are disputable but the flickering in some cheap LED lights is real. Badly/cheaply designed electronics can have flicker as bad as 50 Hz if they use half bridge diode rectification only (e.g. that time I was passing through Geneva airport and the Christmas lights flickered in my peripheral vision)
No it's to punish us when it isn't us causing the alleged plastic problem. When the orders went out all the western media took holidays to the far east to film garbage filled rivers in india, the philippines, indonesia. Your disposable plastic straw wasn't ending up there. Your plastic bottle might have been but that's only because of the recycling scam. It should have been burned like the oil it is.
Or 4D chess by the environmentalists so we go without straws entirely
Classic replacement of something good with something terrible so customers opt out
At switching time, the affordable option was compact fluorescents. Which did suck.
Mouth cancer. I can live a normal life EXCEPT I can't allow liquids to touch my lips. Without straws I have to go through agony just to be minimally hydrated. Paper straws get stuck to my necrotic flesh and tear it off.
There are a variety of conditions that straws are helpful for. A lot of people have health issues that make it difficult to swallow. A lot of people have mouth and lip conditions.
What I don't understand is all the moaning and groaning about the smallest piece of plastic that helps a LOT of disabled people have a semblance of normalcy, when here are much larger plastic fish to fry. We use plastic for basically everything but people have tunnel visioned on a minor piece that actually helps people. It's myopic.
It's exactly the same as for reducing cars in city centers, suddenly almost everyone driving a car is a crippled old lady with 3 children to drop off. When the reality is roughly 1.2 heathly humans per car on average doing a 4km trip for which a convenient alternative exists.
If a straw is a necessary tool for someone to function, I bet you they carry a metal one in their bag.
>Are people that bad at drinking from cups?
You ever had the ice in the bottom of the cup turn into a large chunk then hit you in the face?
Good that they suck, people might realize that they may as well refuse the straw, drink from the glass and that their life is exactly as comfortable as before the ban.
> more or less every non-durable product manufacturer (say, lifespan less than 5 years) should be required to take the product back at end of life and dispose of it properly
Yeah, we had that. Glass milk bottles and coke bottles and bulk goods sold out of barrels by the lb rather than in plastic bags.
But then plastic took off and soon after Big Sugar paid a PR/lobbying firm to run a campaign with a fake Indian crying a single tear and calling every Tom Dick and Harry a “litterbug” and now the pile of garbage is our fault, not the manufacturers.
It was amazing being a kid back then because you could earn some decent coin returning bottles
As European that is not spread everywhere, while you can get some money back in Germany and Greece, there is none to be had in Portugal.
In Germany, it is such a big issue with people not having other source of income, that there is a culture where and how to leave the bottles around so that they are easier to collect.
My neighborhood recycling occurs on Thursday night, so I take all my empty cans and put them in a clear plastic back and put them next to my trash. I do not think that the garbage people have ever gotten the cans; there is always a homeless person that will walk around and pick up the bag of empties, presumably to redeem them somewhere.
I don’t have an issue with it, if they want to do what I am too lazy to do, more power to them.
To play devils advocate I'm old enough to remember when glass bottles and cans were what was around and there are a number of problems there that manufactures would fight...
Glass is heavy as shit. For as much plastic waste as we create, we've saved a ton in fuel costs that would be in the atmosphere otherwise.
Glass likes to break and become a dangerous object/weapon. How much less glass litter is around is amazing. Always fun when you went to the lake, then the hospital because some dipshit broke their coke. It still can happen with liquor, but it's massively reduced the problem.
Also, glass likes to break and cause product inventory shrinkage, which the manufactures and retailers hate.
Same with bulk goods. Never underestimate how fucking dumb your fellow citizens are in their ability to screw up and ruin bulk product displays.
Also, when something in bulk is polluted/one piece goes bad, typically the entire container is a loss.
What we have to force manufactures to do is use plastics that are recyclable and put deposits on them. And then force recycling on the items they collect. This would massively reduce waste by incentivizing the public to gather any they see.
Listen, we can hold Big Plastic accountable and also not throw trash out of our cars, I think.
What’s something we have managed to do this with?
Maybe the process could be emulated.
Switzerland has something like this for "eWaste", it's called the ARC [1] (Advance Recycling Contribution). For any electronic device you purchase a small tax is collected and used for the recycling and collection of the future waste it will generate.
The collection mandatorily happens in the shops that sell electronic devices, you don't have to return them to the exact store where it was purchased, as long as they sell similar devices they cannot refuse to take it back (without paying anything more). It works pretty well, even if shop owners/workers aren't always pleasant when you return something.
[1] https://www.erecycling.ch/en/privatpersonen/blog/vRB-Vorgezo...
Same here in the Netherlands. But only for larger appliances. Washing machines for instance. Smaller ones you have to be able to send for free but there are too many exceptions. My internet provider switched out the modems and simply said "it's yours now, for free!" Meaning: we don't want to pay for disposing of our inventory. I send it to their free postage address they use for broken items with a brick, since they are charged per kg.
Every trash collection site (afvalpunt) has a container for electronics too, that’s where the smaller stuff should go.
We have it in California, just for monitors for some reason, but on Jan 1 a new law covering battery-embedded devices took effect. That new one specifically doesn't tax vapes (???)
https://cdtfa.ca.gov/taxes-and-fees/covered-electronic-waste...
Probably originated for disposal of CRTs, due to all that leaded glass.
Big tobacco strikes again!
> For any electronic device you purchase a small tax is collected and used for the recycling and collection of the future waste it will generate.
I call bullshit on these initiatives. It is a tax, period. The government collects money and it does... stuff. It is not a deposit, so it doesn't incentivize people to return the thing, and it is too general to de-incentivize particularly bad products like disposable vapes.
The tax can be used on recycling efforts, and it probably is, however you don't need a specific tax for that. These investments can come from other sources of government income: VAT, income tax, tariffs, etc... I don't think people are paying a "presidential private jet tax" and yet, the president has his jet, and hopefully, all government effort for the environment is not just financed by a small, specific tax. Saying a tax is for this or that is little more than a PR move, they could do the same by increasing VAT, and I believe it would work better, but that's unpopular.
> The collection mandatorily happens in the shops that sell electronic devices
That is more concrete.
Go further. Every product must be returned to manufacturer at end of life.
Any items found by garbage program will be collected and returned to manufacturer at cost.
All items sold in country must be identifiable for this purpose. Importers are considered the manufacturers and must retrofit products.
Then we would be getting closer to capturing the total burden to society.
> Go further. Every product must be returned to manufacturer at end of life.
Well that Charmin bear will certainly have his work cut out for him
You're thinking disposable vapes, but this will apply to quality of life appliances like washing machines as well, right?
Do you want to live in a world where only the rich can afford washing machines?
Incidentally, I don't know what you do, but once in a while I throw (carefully, li-ion batteries) my broken electronics in the trunk and bring them to the local collection center.
Heh. I am in the EU. For washing machines specifically, I get a tiny discount when I buy a new one for having them pick up the old one for recycling. Possibly for freezers too, but for some reason my washers break but the freezer doesn't.
Not all stores do that though, if I buy from one that doesn't I can call my local recycling center and they'll eventually get around to picking up the old appliance from your home.
However, this is not done by the manufacturer or importer, as the OP suggested. There are separate organizations and it's paid for via a tax on new device purchases.
Which means a new washing machine manufacturer doesn't need to worry about having their own recycling infrastructure. And I move that the recycling tax I pay for national level recycling adds less to the price than $NEW_COMPANY building their own, just for their models.
Thinking for a moment what "recycling" a washing machine would look like and it's very obvious it would just mean paying a 3rd party to dump it in the 3rd world somewhere to be stripped if at all. Hard to imagine it's not causing more environmental damage by having this policy.
The amount of completely useless plastic garbage that we would be sending back east would be mind-numbing. They don’t have anywhere to put that trash either.
> People don't buy this because it's crap. They buy it because it's cheap.
This is an interesting thread to pull on. Why is it so inexpensive for the east to make plastic garbage and sell it to the world?
I don't hate the idea.
But if you think it through, it's intractable. You need to 2x+ the transportation cost of all products (it will cost more to get them back for multiple reasons, including products not being as neatly packaged and often going from many-to-one transportation to many-to-many). Companies also need to double their specializations and adopt recycling processes that will largely be redundant with other companies; you basically make it impossible for small companies to make complicated products. And are we including food products, the majority of trash? It makes a lot more sense to centralize waste repurposing and benefit from economies of scale.
Waste management is already a very profitable industry. Of course, it's wasteful, just burying stuff, and environmentally harmful. But I'm of the opinion that it will soon be economically viable to start mining landfills for different types of enriched materials, and government subsidies could bridge the gap for things that are of greater public interest to recycle.
I've been working on the software side of the technology needed to do this in my spare time for a couple years, waiting for some hardware advancements.
> You need to 2x+ the transportation cost of all products
As with all economics, it's not a one-way street. A change in conditions causes a change in behavior. Increased costs will cause a change in how products are designed, manufactured, used. If one-time use cost goes through the roof, suddenly all vapes will be multi-use. Plastic bottles will disappear in favor of dispensers and multi-use bottles. Not all of them, but most of.
It's about incentives in a dynamic system, not spot bans in an otherwise static world.
Why would 2x the transportation cost be intractable, but ruining the environment, killing life in the oceans, destroying the basis of our future food production, etc, be tractable?
Agreed. Companies could “outsource” their recycling obligations to local (national, regional, whatever) providers.
The full cost of product has externalised the waste bit, and made it the customer and societies problem.
Trash piles is one way the actual cost of things is obfuscated and punted to future generations.
A lot of people wouldn’t want this because it’s asking for stuff to become more expensive for them.
If people had to pay the true cost of their decisions up-front, we'd make a lot of different decisions.
That said, I got quite into this stuff a few years back, and determining "true" cost can be harder than it sounds. Externalities, positive or negative, have to be measured against a baseline, and deciding on where that sits is subject to opinion and bias.
You don't need to get it perfect though. The right incentives get you most of the way. Perfect is the enemy of good.
I’m reading ‘The World Without Us’ by Alan’s Weisman. Last thread like this had someone recommend it (thanks!).
Every bit of plastic humans have made still exits, bar a small amount we have burnt.
That’s concerning.
All petroleum products come from the fossilized remains of the first trees to evolve lignin, which was tough and durable enough to allow trees to grow taller, but also too tough and durable for any other living things to decompose it. At the time, fallen trees would not rot, and the resulting buildup of wood all over the place caused all sorts of ecological problems. Many of those trees ended up buried deep underground before microbes could evolve the means to eat them, where they became fossilized and turned into coal and petroleum, which we eventually turned into plastic.
Now, that plastic is too tough and durable for any modern microbes to decompose it, and it's starting to build up too. It stands to reason that microbes will eventually evolve the means to digest it and make use of this abundant, under-used energy source. In fact, some already have [1], but it's still early days.
I'm not pro-pollution, but this is far from the first ecological disaster that the global ecosystem can probably adapt to.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic_degradation_by_marine_...
I think they are conflating Carboniferous Period / white rot slowing _coal_ formation with Oil formation.
> It stands to reason that microbes will eventually evolve the means to digest it and make use of this abundant, under-used energy source. In fact, some already have [1], but it's still early days.
That’s a hell of a way to kick the can down the road.
I don’t have sea views, but if I wait, sea views are coming.
The ecosystem will be fine, the question is whether we are going to be part of it.
Because it has to start somewhere.
Also many countries collect disposable plastic.
Mechanism design for better trash economics is hard for the same reasons that making a good linearly typed programming language is hard.
I'm not kidding :)
It's funny because I'm working on a type theory first toy language as we speak... so you're not wrong, but I'm also foolish enough to be ambitious.
Stopping there makes sense because plastic sitting in a landfill isn’t harmful. Lithium batteries require special hazmat procedures.
It will raise the costs and the prices, people will be unhappy and this will result in far-right populist parties taking over.
Yes let’s burden any fledging company with the added bureaucracy of having to set up trash collection, disposal and recycling.
Why is trash an "enormous externality"? Even if the retailer took it back it would still be... trash.
> Even if the retailer took it back it would still be... trash.
Yes, but making them deal with it would create a massive incentive to either reduce the amount of rubbish they make, or to make it recyclable/processable.
It's an externality because the entity that sold it to you doesn't have to pay the consequences of dealing with the trash. OP said "dispose of it properly," which could mean a lot of things, all of which are better than leaving it on a beach.
Nearly all the plastic humans have made still exists.
The great garbage patch in the Pacific is growing fast. The plastic is ending up in everything. We need to do better.
Make less waste. Use less plastic.
It should be at a minimum stored safely. How and why are the environmental effects not a factor for you?
The great pacific garbage patch disagrees.
They should just be banned outright. In no world is this going to end up in bins 100% of the time. Disposable really means it’s destined for the trash at best, and just simply litter at worst.
This guy[1] explains the problem quite well.
Yeah ban is the answer. Trouble is that, as shown in the article, even if they include the charging and refilling bits they can be cheap enough to throw away after use.
Taxing waste is one part of the story but it's actually a really good thing that vaping is cheaper than smoking so this can only go so far before it's counterproductive.
I think the answers lie in stuff like banning sale of pre-filled ones. If you make people buy a separate bottle of nicotine liquid (and you enforce that this is quite a large minimum size, like we already do with tobacco) and fill the device up before they use it, I think they are much more likely to refill it when it's empty and recharge it when it's dead.
Maybe another thing could be restricting points of sale. I bet a lot of the waste comes from drunk people buying them at 10pm in the corner shop near the pub. If you make people plan ahead that might also help.
> Trouble is that, [...], even if they include the charging and refilling bits they can be cheap enough to throw away after use.
Well that is fixable, it's even one of the solutions posited here. Just make them artificially expensive by adding a deposit, which you'll get back when you return it to the shop (instead of throwing it away).
But they don't need to be taken back anywhere. They are reusable. So this just ends up back at what I said about "taxing waste".
I think disposable vapes are banned in the U.K. (where I think the author is?) or at least they will be soon. But the non-disposable options end up being cheap enough that they can be disposed of when empty.
I think a better thing to do may be to try to embed disposal costs into the price of the original product. That changes prices to hopefully incentivise reuse.
This is true but as a workaround disposable vapes now all include a charging port but are still treated as disposable (so is just another component to be wasted)
I'm in favour of a full ban but it's complex
Most countries don't do enough at all.
For example Germany, while the country is famous for the whole splitting the garbage, I am still waiting after 20 years to see the kitchen oil recycling recipients as we have in Portugal.
As for electronics, I would say no one has anything in place, and human nature is as such that hardly anyone will drive to the next recycling center to deliver a single device that broke down, or call the city hall to collect it.
We should go back to the old days, when electronics were repairable, which naturally companies will lobby against, as that will break down the capitalistic curve of exponential growth in sales.
> As for electronics, I would say no one has anything in place
In Dutch Mediamarkt, the same company as Saturn in Germany I believe, they have bins for electric devices.
Those are mandatory in Germany. Recently-ish they started forcing supermarkets and other large retailers to accept small electronics, but in practice I never managed to do it. You pretty much have to argue with the staff every time.
For used toner/ink cartridges yes, for electric devices in theory yes, in practice not everywhere.
However that doesn't change the disposable garbage thing, I bet most of them land in some African landfill instead of being properly recycled.
Not sure about electronics as a whole, but I was able to recycle (or at least dispose of properly) an inflated old Dell laptop battery at either a Best Buy or a Home Depot (I'd assume it was the former, but they were next to each other so I don't recall). This is in the US.
Home Depot accepts old batteries. Though it's kind of terrifying because they accept batteries in any condition as long as you put them in individual plastic bags.
And then there's a huge bin of damaged LiPos just chilling by the front door. I'm astonished we don't hear about fires in these bins.
The point is what happens to them when the container full of them ships away.
Maybe Italy is more advanced, you can bring eWaste to the municipal center or to leave to the shop where you are buying a new device. On the street they started to place bin for small eWaste like phones, chargers, keyboards, vape.
>As for electronics, I would say no one has anything in place
I Portugal there is Rede Electrão. You can deposit those devices in a lot of supermarkets, stores and fire stations.
Thanks for the heads up, I thought the only way was to drive down the city recycling center where they get pilled up inside a shipping container.
> For example Germany, while the country is famous for the whole splitting the garbage, I am still waiting after 20 years to see the kitchen oil recycling recipients as we have in Portugal.
Because German environmental policy is about virtue signalling to keep the plebs busy, not solving environmental problems. Nuclear power plants replaced by coal and natural gas, obsession with recycling but nothing done about disposable packaging, car regulations and city design dictated for decades by the car manufacturing lobby, combustion engine limits/bans only when said manufacturers thought they could get on the Tesla gravy train and subsequently rolled back when reality became apparent, it just goes on.
Yeah, what is so hard to have something like this? Sorry only in portuguese, you will need to use automatic translation on it.
https://www.prio.pt/pt/prio-ecowaste
This is only one of the places, there are others where used oil can be brought in.
Based on your reply you haven't fully considered context. Smokers don't care about themselves or else they wouldn't smoke. As demonstrated by the article, you can see proof that they also don't care for the environment. What makes you think people who intentionally pay to kill themselves and then throw the waste on the ground instead of trash will ever recycle?
Smoking is expensive, and people carry these in their pockets, and replace them within hours once they run dry.
If there were a deposit scheme of say five bucks a piece, I'd wager you'd see >80% return rates with every purchase.
This is so incredibly simplistic it cannot be an argument in a good faith.
Addictions exists. To stop smoking is HARD. Nicotine addition us on par with benzos, prescription opiates or amphetamines.
It's a summation. Go pick up litter for an hour or 2 in your neighborhood and categorize the rubbish you collect. When I do this (large sample) the results are: ~80% tobacco, 14% fast food waste, 5% alcohol waste, 1% other.
Point being, many smokers litter. My thesis after a lot of public service is they do this because: they don't care about themselves, so why would they care about anything else?
Right. My point is nicotine addiction doesn't force littering.
Why though? Bottles/cans are easily recycled and I believe the small reimbursement is easily recovered during the recycling costs.
It's not profitable to recycle small electronic devices otherwise you'd see heaps of shops doing it. It's toxic, hazardous and labour intensive.
100 times the deposit amount would be like $5-10 USD per-device which is insane. I do agree that any retailers should be required to take back empties and dispose of them responsibly.
> It's not profitable to recycle small electronic devices otherwise you'd see heaps of shops doing it. It's toxic, hazardous and labour intensive.
Sounds like they should be banning their sale and/or production then, just like many jurisdictions have been with plastics and other non-recyclable items. These devices are not an essential-to-life item where the waste produced is justifiable, especially when you consider the LiPo batteries, which are a borderline-environmental disaster from the moment the lithium is mined to the day that battery finds its way to a landfill. Why single-use disposable vaping devices exist in the first place is somewhat perplexing given permanent/re-fillable ones are also available, often right beside the disposable ones, and generally offer a significantly lower cost of ownership.
> Why single-use disposable vaping devices exist in the first place is somewhat perplexing given permanent/re-fillable ones are also available
I suspect you could make the same argument for manufactured cigarettes vs pipe tobacco. It seems people will pay for convenience.
I think waste management should be required to scan the garbage and remove useful items, i.e. recyclables. This would take the burden off consumers and allow more items like this to be intercepted. The technology is there, why not force the corporation to innovative?
Because they are a fire hazard:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62vk0p5dn5o
Trash compactors break the batteries in these things. A deposit could help to ensure that the vapes are disposed responsibly.
Other option: Add an "electronics" bin everywhere. Though that would be more expensive and less clear how effective it would be.
How and why are the environmental effects not a factor for you?
I see more vape litter on the beach than bottles and cans. The deposit is part of why that is
It's very profitable to recycle small electronics in some economies where thousands of companies do it (eg India or Shenzhen); in countries where human labour is more expensive, it's untenable
I just received a $10 deposit refund for returning my motorcycle battery to the battery shop.
That's a good point. In America we call this type of deposit a "core charge." The "core" is the component you return to the store to get your deposit back.
This is done for components like starter motors, alternators, power steering pumps, batteries, and a variety of other components. The complex components are re-manufactured to like-new specifications and the less complex components are recycled to recover materials. The battery is a probably the only component where the potential ecological impact drives the cost of the deposit.
I was curious about when and where these core charges started. It looks like it was the result of WW2 and the shortage of steel and other materials forcing both the military and civilian manufacturers to turn to recycling and rebuilding parts out of necessity. After the war, the remanufacturing industry was large enough to stand on its own and the concepts stuck around. Some hazardous items like lead acid batteries have legislation helping to enforce the core charges but the rest seem to be market driven.
Lead actually has a pretty good scrap value.
What if it worked like the carts at Aldi? Put something reasonable like 3-5 bucks on the sale amount, and redeem the same amount when returned.
Yes, that is also how the deposit on a can of soda works.
i pay 25c to leave my cart in the lot
You paying a nonzero cost for creating a negative externality is an improvement compared to the status quo, in the context of this economic philosophy of discouraging production of negative externalities by aligning economic incentives.
big words for you. I pay for it.
If i do not pay, i always return the cart.
Someone else brings it back and makes 25c. Win-win. That's how any deposit program works.
Congrats.
I don't want to advertise for the brand but I bought a disposable "looking" vape today where they split the liquid from the core. So the end result is a very small stick but is actually re-usable and they had a re-cycling digital bin.
The problem is you can’t find any company willing to recycle them. Because of the nicotine content, I’ve heard e-waste recyclers consider them hazardous waste and refuse to touch them.
yeah, e-waste recyclers suck, they love to ship it all to the 3rd world where piles of circuit boards get tossed in an open fire and stirred by kids to reclaim the metals.
Here's a slightly old investigation finding 40% of ewaste being shipped off to china: https://www.ban.org/news-new/2016/9/15/secret-tracking-proje...
vape products does not all contain nicotine, it's an ingredient you choose to add in your blend,
you can choose to either vape a flavour version only, or one containing a certain amount of nicotine
Sure, but the people doing the recycling have no idea what's inside of it.
I feel like the take it back approach, just ends with the retailer/manufacturer throwing it away anyway.
Looking at this device it feels like it shouldn't be hard to have a reusable base with battery and electronics, and a disposable capsule that attaches on top but is replaceable.
Who bears the cost of that improvement? Either the manufacturer, the retailer, or the customer. The problem is that the waste created by vapes is a negative externality so there's no incentive to improve their design. Until the government starts requiring safe disposal of these things, we won't see a change. Think about what people used to do with old car oil before new environment protection regulations.
You think China is gonna take all of em back?
Why should that be China's problem?
Someone imported it, someone's selling it in the stores.
If the price of the "disposable" is, say, £5, make the deposit £50. Suddenly all the vapes will end up back at the retailer.
And make sure retailer has the financial incentive to return the used disposables and that's it.
I'm confident the lawmakers have been bribed to refuse to tackle the problem, otherwise how you can explain minimum price on plastic bags but tolerating toxic landfill fires and staggering waste of lithium (recycling will inevitably br fixed soon).
Well realistically just ban imports. But then people will import them criminally anyway. And to your point; what if Chinese companies assist in evading import bans or customs, as they do now and have done for decades.
Even in the UK, they've added restrictions to it but...surprise, surprise the Turkish/Kurdish corner shops all have a steady supply, with nothing being done about it. As a foreigner living here it's honestly pathetic how disengaged the public here are with things like that. People drive like absolute wankers, too.
I've seen some universities in my country have deposit boxes specifically for single-use vapes
God bless these horrible devices are not disposed in billions every day as bottles are!
> Many countries have deposits for single use bottles/cans [...]
Yeah, the deposits for cans are a bit stupid: people already widely recycle aluminum (and scrap metals in general) purely for commercial reasons. No need for extra regulation there like mandatory deposits.
It's much easier to recycle things when everyone participate and bring their trash to a common place.
I've lived in places with no deposits and there is much much much more littering compared to places having deposits on every types of metal/plastic beverage containers
"I Powered My House Using 500 Disposable vapes" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dy-wFixuRVU
Man. I don't actually know anyone who vapes. I see it in public sometimes and just assumed people refilled them - maybe they do. Seeing him hold some up, seeing all that plastic, metal, electronics, all that Work (Joules) expended, in something that you just dump after a day is nuts. I can't think of anything else like that. Maybe plastic water bottles but they don't have even half the materials or complexity? Maybe I under-estimate how much is put into regular cigarettes or beer & cans.
Refillable vapes used to be the standard around a decade ago, back when a liter of vape base (without nicotine) cost 30€ at max. Disposable vapes pretty much didn't exist. Now the same liter of vape base (still without nicotine) is a "tobacco product" and costs 400€+ due to taxes thanks to decade-long lobbying efforts by big tobacco, turning refillable vapes into a massive niche product due to single-use vapes costing the same or less, without any of the hassle of mixing your own liquids or having to refill them.
Are you referring to VG/PG? Are they really that expensive for you? That's wild.
I'm confused. Why wouldn't the same taxes apply to a disposable vape which has the same liquid inside of it?
Also, in the GP comment, you mentioned the cost was 400€ but here you're saying 56€. Are you talking about different things?
I guess it's time to not only make the vaping liquids yourself, but the bases too :P
Quick Googling suggests I'd pay less than 30 euro for a liter of VG. What about for the nicotine concentrate? I'd pay about 20 euros for 100ml of 20mg/ml concentrate.
A little calibrating correction: A vape should last more than a day unless you're a very heavy user. Around three days with a '700 puffs' one maybe, and a week wouldn't be unheard of.
The puff number was extremely exaggerated on the disposable ones I've tried.
The complexity of a can isn't as extreme as a disposable ARM chip, but it is still quite a sophisticated mass produced object. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUhisi2FBuw
Many daily life, single use objects have a lot of thoughts put into them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pj0ze8GnBKA
What a brave and adventurous soul.
If you believe Lumafield, 8% of low-quality lithium ion batteries have a mechanical defect that can sometimes lead to a short circuit.
Is this person really brave, or just unaware of the risks?
https://www.lumafield.com/article/finding-hidden-risks-in-th...
He put a fuse on every individual cell and on the overall unit, so I would say he was reasonably cautious (although he deployed a bunch of high-voltage exposed wires at the end of the video, but we can assume that was just a tech demo).
fuses only help for overcurrent scenarios. if they cell overdischarges due to a mechanical fault, or internally shorts, the fuses wont do anything. any then if it internally shorts at an SOC > like 20-30%, it'll vent and cascade into other cells.
Running a web server off a disposable vape: https://bogdanthegeek.github.io/blog/projects/vapeserver/
Soon: "Quake on a vape pen"
Is that a LAN party in your pocket?
I mean, naturally there's Doom on a vape [0], so as far as I'm concerned, that box is already ticked. Someone should give a good name to the law that every hardware device with a screen has a Doom port.
of course it had to be Bogdan to do something like this ahahah :)
Our whole current civilization could be construed as advanced alien tech servicing a humongous tribe of moronic apes. The fact that one fifth of the internet is dedicated to porn just speaks for itself. Just thinking about all the tech involved, from the capturing of footage using highly sophisticated camera, to the transmission over kilometers of fiber optics, to the stokage into redundant and consistent databases backed by highly optimized hardware and brilliantly engineered file format, to the distribution to your phone device, which is literally a personal computer that fits in your palm.. all of that just to show porn to satisfy your monkey brain.
It seems almost absurd to what length humanity has gone just to satisfy it's primitive needs.
In the past, entire intercontinental trade routes existed just to get food seasoned, so what you’re pointing out isn’t that unusual. The desire for sensual pleasures drives most things (and not only in humans).
Let's not forget that with both porn AND all the other "junk food" on social media that we waste away on: there are very smart people getting paid a lot of money to make/keep you hooked on them.
IMO this is as much a "we are hopelessly dumb monkeys who just want to satisfy ourselves" as as it is "there's clever monkeys who know and exploit our monkey weaknesses so they can make more money."
This is an issue I've perceived with technology for a while now. Even a lowly ape like myself can gain disproportionate rewards from using computer technology in ways that many people around me can't. I could use it in constructive or exploitative fashions if I chose to, at scales I could never imagine without it. That has never sat well with me because I know there are people smarter than I am with a lot more resources than I have. And they also have no scruples, so exploitation is in their tool box.
I imagine these same types of people with similar tendencies would be regulated and mitigated by their peers more in the past. Say something like 200 years ago, you might be intelligent and cunning enough to gain power in a community, but it would never mean what it can mean today. The scaling factors are literally beyond comprehension. The accumulation of power, the modes of deception or concealment, sheer scale, all of it... It's too much for people to really track anymore, and it can continue largely unfettered in so many cases.
All that is to say yes, I think a tremendous number of people are being unwittingly exploited. The attention land-grab is arguably the most obvious battle field, but there are certainly others.
I feel like our whacky world is only made possible by fossil fuels. Like why is it profitable to
- build these vapes and sell them for a few dollars? - tear down an entire house, rebuild a new one from scratch, and sell it? - ship things all the way across the entire freakin ocean instead of manufacturing them locally? - mine cryptocurrency?
To me the answer is always fossil fuels. We stumbled on an energy source so dense (at first, seemingly) infinite that it just wildly increased the amount of energy we can use. For most of human history our greatest constraint was energy, then that constraint was just blown the fuck off.
I feel like our whole society is riding a high of cheap energy. We attribute so much progress to things like science and democracy and great thinkers and revolutionaries. But how much of it was really just fossil fuels and nitrogen fixing??
It's interesting that this is where your mind goes on an unrelated bit of content.
3% of the internet is complaining that 20% of the internet is porn.
--source, my butt.
And yet it utterly fails to satisfy these needs in a real way
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A lovely video from a Shenzhen factory, mass producing disposable vapes, in case someone's interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WohEiRvn2Dg+
Most likely a promotional from the looks of it. I myself stumbled over it a about a year ago, when someone posted it on an IRC channel.
lol, at 0:15 someone is literally testing the vapes with their mouth. I hope they don't do that all day long
Later at 6:45 they show more people testing them
It’s hard to know for sure what’s acceptable when it comes to working conditions in China. The information we get is incredibly limited. Most of what makes it through is propaganda.
That said, it wouldn’t surprise me if he does it all day long, 6 days per week.
They are, there's a video on YouTube you can find where they interview someone with that job and they test 10,000 a day. Then they mention that they go home and vape some more
That’s much less automated than I would have thought. Also the dude vape testing the sticks… I don’t think they are aware they are probably doing more damage than good.
Not great from a hygiene perspective given they never show it being sterilised after the manual check.
It's not that surprising that a company that sells these awful gadgets to people who don't really care about their own health would behave in such a manner.
We really need to ban these things.
The reason disposables are so popular in the US is the FDA banned any flavored cartridges, which doesn't include disposables. The immense battery waste is a direct result of a relatively new law.
That doesn't explain why vapes are so rife elsewhere, particularly the UK. They're popular because, as the FT described, they're the ultimate product. Cool, cheap and addictive.
https://www.ft.com/content/f72f17e4-a83d-4494-b1e7-a349cc7ae...
UK also banned them
We're doing about as well at policing the vape ban as we are the ban on cocaine (which, in case you hadn't noticed, is everywhere)
Hardly, they banned fully disposable. You can still by them but now you can swap in a refill cartridge. The price of this refillable one is the same as the original.
Many places apparently don't even sell the refills so it's practically the same.
Good intentions and lack of foresight often combine poorly.
The fault lies with vape manufacturers. It’s big tobacco. They are soulless ghouls.
That hasn’t been true here in New Zealand. Although the nuance around what counts as a vape may be where this is happening.
I seriously wonder how it's even feasible for these things to be profitable.
Well, since pretty much everything that consumes power today has an MCU in it, simple MCUs are extremely cheap. Volumes are immense. They are also space efficient and it is easy to manufacture PCBAs with them. They also occupy that sweet spot where the need for low power consumption means that you use gate sizes that are fairly largeish -- manufacturing processes and technology that is much, much cheaper than what is used for CPUs for instance.
Same thing with batteries. Ridiculous volume -> low prices. (Laptops and cell phones is why we have usable electric cars. If the EV industry had to drive up the volume all on its own it would have taken much longer to develop that industry)
The other reason is regulatory arbitrage -- the disposal vapes are often illegal products that circumvent laws in general.
The other reason is kids.
Kids don't have to hide proof of their consumption in their bedroom (well at least until they are hooked enough they can't spend a night without vaping). They buy, consume and throw away before reaching home.
> They buy, consume and throw away before reaching home.
That would require a crazy high amount of smoking. AFAIK, disposable vapes usually last about a week.
Or 7 undergrads and one day.
Your point is quite valid, but example is wrong. Those vapes can have a lot of puff in them, they need to be really heavy smoker to smoke out in 1 session.
But reuseable vape has more stuff to manage and hide, and they are more expensive in short run.
> FDA banned any flavored cartridges, which doesn't include disposables
Wait, what? Where's the sense in that?
I think just an oversight—disposables weren't really around at the time the time that the ban happened. 2019, people were mostly smoking Juul and having those crazy custom rigs that they fill with the juice. Disposables really started to take off around 2021 - 2022. Atleast that's what I saw with people around me in NY and California.
Yeah, in my state, with disposable I can get any flavor. But if I want juice or pods, I can only get nasty tobacco flavor. It's an easy choice.
Also, when you do get juice online or from other states, it doesn't hit as hard / the same as whatever they put in the disposables. Someone told me it's because the disposables have vitamin E acetate in them that makes the nicotine get absorbed into your blood quicker.
I think the disposables go around more regulations, which mean the chinese manufacturers can put more addictive stuff in the pods / disposables.
Putting vitamin E acetate into vape liquid appears to be extremely hazardous.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%932020_vaping_lung_...
If true I wonder if that has to do with this incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%932020_vaping_lung_...
Weed disposables are a whole rabbit hole by themselves.
You want to buy a disposable? Ok, here, $20 and you're done.
But if you want to make the oil at home? Ok, $2000 for lights, timers, nutrients, seeds, and a grow tent. Plus another ~$10,000 for a basic short path distillation setup. And honestly to make anything close to what you get in the disposables, you'll need to hire an expert with experience. And you need a lot of space for your new secret lab. For 99.999% of people, it's super not worth it to make at home.
I'm kind of in favor of non-persecution OTC at a pharmacy nicotine patches.
I hate anything added to the air. Even perfumes irritate and make me sneeze in high quantity.
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Did that in Australia - the problem is even worse now. Disposable vapes were a market response to banning and restricting pod vapes (where you can keep the base and just swap out the pod).
Nicotine policy and policing has been a clusterf - not only are there wasteful disposable vapes everywhere, but a thriving black market that has lead to firebombings and murders.
Sounds like they didnt ban it properly. There aren't really nicotine junkies like heroin. So I suspect ban nicotine and slowly everyone stops using nicotine sources.
Everyone I know who vapes nicotine is a junkie about it.
In fact, nicotine habits can be harder to kick than heroin. I know plenty of people who have tried to kick nicotine many times and cannot stay off of it.
Anyway, it's moot, because outright banning tobacco is insane.
It's the habit, not the high.
Kind of odd because the withdrawal is, physically, less taxing than caffeine (never mind opiates...), and yet the brain rewiring to chase the hit is somehow far more pernicious.
There were two countries in the 20th century which tried to ban alcohol. Both had a.. very lasting consequences.
You can't "just ban" it or "ban it properly". You would get a very nasty black market and things with such ban.
Disclaimer: I'm a non-smoker
As mentioned upthread, Australia has been running a similar strategy of trying to tax smoking out of existence and all that's happened is they've rediscovered the Laffer curve as well as pushing otherwise law-abiding citizens towards illegal tobacco.
There's a limit to how much sin tax people are prepared to put up with. Either its legal to consume or it's not, and vapes are far less objectionable to be near by than traditional cigarettes. It bemuses me that Aus, NZ, Singapore etc have gone down the path of trying to ban vape usage when the alternative is far worse.
"The more you tighten your grip .. " etc.
There aren't really alcohol or cannabis junkies like heroin either. That didn't make prohibition or the war on drugs successful.
There definitely are "alcohol junkies"; we just call them alcoholics
They are straight up banned in Australia but you often see them chucked in the gutters and rivers. Only seems like they started raiding the stores in the last few months.
The vape ban in Australia is utterly stupid though. All vapes are banned, not just disposables, and guess what's easier to discretely sell to kids from a newsagency.
Doesn't seem to have stopped kids getting their vapes yet I need to import my cannabis vape via the black market.
Wow that is stupid. NZ banned disposable or non-rechargeable vapes only, refillable/pod-swappable and rechargeable ones are still on sale.
They're not all banned, you just need a prescription to get one which realistically should've been implemented day 0.
Eventually it'll prove very impactful with the youth, it'll reduce the number of users and make it more cost prohibitive to be so prolific as it is right now.
Yeah I don't think my doctor is going to give me a cannabis vape prescription, though admittedly I haven't asked.
I don't see how making vapes prescription only changes the situation with children, which is that all tobacco products are illegal to sell or provide to a person under 18. Cracking down on the sale of tobacco to children does not require tobacco products to be made prescription only, these are orthogonal issues. All this does is drive profit towards shonky pill doctors who advertise on facebook that one cheap over the phone appointment is all you need to "feel great again" and other euphemisms, and will give you any pill you ask for regardless of the medical suitability.
Why do we need to ban these? I'm not trying to be contrarian, but why do some people appear to be for banning tobacco but not alcohol? I don't claim to have all the answers or even strong opinions, but if your going to ban one recreational drug with negative externalities you should ban them all. I'd much rather hear people's opinions then ask AI.
If alcohol came inside of little battery powered computers, we should ban those too.
I don't think the post you're responding to is saying that vapes should be banned. Just disposable ones.
> If alcohol came inside of little battery powered computers, we should ban those too.
I too am agnostic but do not understand this reasoning. BTW let me get severely downvoted by saying that if alcohol prohibition came up for a vote I'd vote yes in a heartbeat.
You may wish to reread the comment. I started the phrase with “BTW“, implying I knew it was slightly outside of context.
No, banning disposable vapes
Thanks for the clarification, I can see banning disposable vapes but still allowing reusable ones.
I think broadly prohibition didn't work but smoking bans do. Where "work" means fewer people smoke and passive smoke.
Alcohol prohibition did actually work.
It reduced the amount of people who drank and it increased health. It increased safety for women and children and reduced violent crime on the streets and in the home. It reduced alcohol related diseases and death. People missed less work. Like with passive smoking, a ban on alcohol positively affects non-drinkers too.
It was the organised crime side effects and societal unpopularity which lead to it's "failure". Alcohol prohibition continues to work in some countries today but I wouldn't want to live there.
Ultimately it's a bio-ethics and freedom issue, issues that continue to raise their head from time to time here and there, e.g. coronavirus responses.
Control of vaping could also be classed in this category.
Prohibition works to stop some people.
It doesn't stop addicts from craving and it doesn't curb the appeal of the product. People who think tobacco/nicotine bans would work are people who think they don't have any positive effect associated with them.
People don't smoke because the evil cigarette companies tricked them and now they are addicted. It's a drug, it feels good to do it.
A tobacco/nicotine ban will end up exactly like aby other recreational drug prohibition.
People have been smoking for thousands of years.
If that's how you you define work, prohibition worked.
Singapore and AFAIK Thailand banned vapes altogether. And it seems to be actually enforced. They have completely different grounds for it but still, there's already some movement in this space.
In Thailand, regular smoking is shunned by the public but vapes are literally everywhere.
I've even seen 15-16 year old boys in Thailand pick up their girlfriends on motorbikes, race their friends to the food court, drink a couple of beers and vape once they get there, then ride their girlfriends home again while still under the influence, all without helmets mind you.
Pipe and roll-your-own tobacco are also banned in Singapore, but regular cigarettes are sold just fine. There may be a different reason for the bans.
Vapes illegal, but weed legal, that's great
Not. I've seen young teenagers vape in Thailand, that's how enforced it is. They only catch foreigners from whom they can extract thousand-dollar bribes.
They do seem to be banned in an around 10 states at this point though there is some sort of existing stock law or something so if you ask them you still seem to be able to buy them. They don’t seem to be on display anymore though.
No, just let the scavengers continue collecting and reusing them.
as a first step, let's tax these things. this is such an immense waste of electronics.
I hate smoking, never smoked. Should the vapes be banned because of e-waste, or high school kids getting strung out, or what? It's not a world I know.
As a smoker who transitioned to vaping, I see immense health benefits.
My home country (India), and others (Singapore, others?) have outright banned all electronic cigarettes which is a regulation I hate. I acknowledge that vapes reduce barriers to entry to kids. This is partly solvable in countries with strong governance.
But disposables? Ban that shit
The issue is that when legislation comes in regarding "disposable" vapes - manufacturers skirt around that by making the fluid chamber a removable pod that can be swapped for others, and a USB-C port for charging the device itself.
The issue is that to the end user this is still tangibly the same product - and mostly gets treated in much the same way as the original "disposable" vapes.
Have you seen the list of substances found in these things?
https://www.unodc.org/LSS/Announcement/Details/8afbc6e8-9439...
You get downvoted because you're implying substances like methamphetamine are common in vapes (as per your linked article), which it obviously is not, and already highly illegal.
The truth is you can mix your own vape juice from just PG, VG and nicotine. Which are completely harmless to eat (except nicotine) and used in food products. A more rational discussion would be about if inhaling PG and VG is harmful to the lungs, or the additional unregulated stuff you find in flavoring of vape juice.
> Which are completely harmless to eat (except nicotine) and used in food products
Or we think so unless proven otherwise.
Yep. I definitely don't want to eat antifreeze based ice cream, or smoke antifreeze either.
Unfortunately the legal vape market acts as a cover for the illegal vape market. Vapes containing cannabinoids and other drugs are sold in shops.
I fully support banning these things. It's impossible to regulate effectively without.
I would dearly love to know why I get downvoted for providing concrete evidence of serious problems with controlled drugs in vapes.
The rechargable vapes just get disposed anyway.
Currently working on a method to recycle / repurpose the li-ion cells obtained from the disposable vapes, trying to scale up the recycling effort by releasing products to fund the manpower required to breakdown and sort the vape components . Getting close to releasing the first 100 demo models of the product for stress testing in the wild. Currently based in the greater Seattle area and here is a link to my site if anyone wanted to know more: https://2ndchancemnd.com/
Came to this thread to shout you guys out! I was super impressed by your presentation at Open Sauce 2025.
This shouldn't be surprising since a vape is a safety critical device. Primarily because the temperature control has to be precise and you have to solve a surprisingly large number of control problems that can arise in real life. For instance, if you overshoot the temperature the amount of toxic by-products can increase sharply. You can also cause parts of the vape to disintegrate, and then aspirate things you really do not want in your lungs.
And this is before we get into dealing with the battery -- which has its own set of risks.
(One of the early sources of funding for MyNewt development was a company that made vapes. Though not disposable ones if I remember correctly).
Also, the MCUs they use are very cheap. They are cheaper than having lots of specialized discrete electronics.
I think you overestimate how much vape companies care about safety. When there is no liquid left, you just vape smoke from burning cotton (it tastes like burned plastic) on half of these devices. There are checks for this, but they are not that good.
I'm sure most don't care more than regulations require them to care (including making tradeoffs in terms of risks of getting caught, and the chance of actual enforcement). But that doesn't change the fact that it is a safety-critical device. It produces something that interfaces directly with sensitive tissues.
I talked to someone who worked on developing vapes and they spent much, if not most, of their engineering on safety-related issues. They may be an outlier. The reason I remember is because I was surprised how dangerous these devices really are if you get things wrong.
As a software engineer with some hardware experience, I would never use a vape. It strikes me as way too risky. Much for the reason you point out: the companies probably don't care more than they are forced to by regulations.
I'd love to see a breakdown of the design and whether or not any of these vapes have any Safety Critical Function considerations, or if they just rely on the mcu for everything and have a ton of single fault risks.
I've just started a Salvage Pile in my workshop. Laser printer with fax modem was the first for excision and harvest. I could feel the addiction take hold before the last of the plastic shell was tossed into the refuse bin. The stepper motors alone!
I have a huge old microwave on the blocks next. After that a series of small odd ball electronic toys and a few early LED bulbs. If I ever come across a vape, I'm sure it'll make its way on to the shelf.
With regards to the microwave, here’s a token “please safely discharge and double check the cap” comment!
With regards to vapes, just look on the ground near a sidewalk. I find like 3 or 4 big depleted vapes a day in a US urban area. Closer to 15 or 20 in greater London in the UK.
As a second regards the microwave, depending on the age, please be extremely careful about the magnetron the insulators on which could contain beryllium oxide, which can kill you.
There are a lot of fun parts inside microwaves (a personal favorite is the high-torque-low-speed-line-voltage motor, which I use to make creepy Halloween decorations) but the caps, transformer, and magnetron are all useful for somewhat... more dangerous... pursuits.
the insulators on which could contain beryllium oxide
As far as I can tell, this is an urban legend. No consumer microwave oven has ever used beryllium in its magnetron insulators. Military radar ones, yes (and likely where the legend started.) Some specialist test equipment and RF transmitters too, and they all contain prominent warnings of it. Besides its toxicity, it's far more expensive than regular alumina.
That's my understanding as well, but I still wouldn't disassemble a 1960s microwave without protection (I have assisted in the dismantling of a couple microwave communications devices which did contain BeO and were also very well-labeled as such). Anything from the 80s on at least is almost certainly aluminum.
> Closer to 15 or 20 in greater London in the UK.
Weren't disposable vapes banned in UK in May 2025? Is the problem still that big?
Sort of. "Single use disposables" were banned, but the companies switched immediately to a two-part unit which, AFAICT, is still used and thrown away in exactly the same fashion.
Sample size of 1, but I have a friend who does buy the refills and charges the original unit. Every shop that sells the combination units also seems to sell the refills (at least around here).
I haven’t been back since February last year. I guess a win for some people!
Go too far and you might be labeled a hoarder.
I don't smoke/vape, but I saw some pretty absurd models available recently that really piqued my interest. One had a touchscreen, could run some basic apps, and had wifi/bluetooth support. The other had a d-pad + buttons built in and a few ripoffs of classic games you could play. I bought one of each to start ripping them apart on my work bench and playing with the firmware. Unfortunately I got busy and haven't done much more than look at the internals. They're using some sort of cheap smart watch SoC. It's wild you can get a battery, touchscreen, charging circuit, and a microprocessor for like $12.
Some of the COVID test kits that were popular a few years ago(!) were even more complex.
"One man's trash is another man's treasure."
I still think the next evolution of these vapes is for a Tamagotchi-esque device to get built into them and to have the pet grow when you inhale through it. You're already walking around with enough tech - why not gamify it more?
I think you might be joking but OK, I'll respond like you're serious as this is HN.
You want to make vaping even more addictive than it already is?
They’re making a prediction, not a value judgement.
I promise to cry if a docker container is found in there.
Scheduled by k8s
the way they're discarded definitely embodies the "cattle not pets" approach
By 2040 there will be a disposable LLM in there as good as today's claude.
By 2080, it will be fully sentient, and derive pleasure when you use it, and suffer loneliness if you don't, and do its best to convince you.
Basically the weapons from "High on Life" or the butter robot from Rick and Morty, but as a vape.
"I'm Mister Vapeseeks, smoke from me~e!" *shudder*
The ESP32 (with Bluetooth and WiFi) is like $5 on AMZN. Which is probably sub-$2 in any meaningful quantity in Shenzhen. We've been living, at least until the tariffs, in a StarTrek like world where whatever we want is available from Shenzhen for a ridiculously low price (which in many respects is better than "free" because "free" brings with it its own humongous problems).
$5 is very expensive in the microcontroller world.
Which 10 Cent Microcontroller is Right for You? Comparing the CH32V003 to the PY32F002A.
I'm amazed there isn't more of an outcry against these things. I'm not an environmental activist, but even I'd feel wrong just throwing something like that away.
In 40 more years I wonder what the equivalent of "same specs in a disposable vape as home computer from 80's" will be
Someone reversed a vape that contains a Puya Microcontroller. https://github.com/grahamwhaley/py32c642_vape
Remember interviewing for a security role at Phillip Morris who owns the IQOS e-cigaret brand. They bragged about how the device phoned home every time it could get a bluetooth or wifi connection, to inform of consumption amount and patterns - so they could proactively send users more nicotine.
He dramatically revealed that they were no longer selling tobacco, but rather "Nicotine as a service"
Needless to say, I decided not to work for a merchant of death
In the 70s, the Polaroid SX-70 camera included a disposable battery in every film pack. After 10 shots, you threw away both it and the plastic film case with its large metal spring mechanism. When the film production stopped in the late 00s, you could use 600 film designed for other polaroid bodies reloaded into a 779 native SX70 cartridge, because the battery would last much longer than the initial 10 shots.
Is this actually disposable if it has the rechargeable battery and display? Or is it maybe like a lighter that technically can be refilled but nobody ever does?
It's so curious why these things are addictive. Before I tried a vape (it was called an e-cigarette back then) I thought the addictive thing about cigarettes is the nicotine. That's part of it, but a huge part (possibly even bigger) is just the sensation of sucking in smoke/vapour from a little stick and exhaling it. Is it similar to sucking on a mother's teat or something? It really seems to satisfy in a way nothing else does.
In the UK truly disposable vapes are banned, thankfully, but I do wonder if it's now just "technically refillable" ones that people use one time. They should be taxed to the eyeballs to encourage reuse if so.
It's both disposable and rechargeable. It has to be rechargeable as the battery doesn't contain enough capacity for the total amount of juice that's stored in them. E.g. a vape could have 10k puffs of juice, but the battery only lasts for ~2k of puffs so you have to recharge it about 5 times until the juice runs out. But once it runs out, there's no way to refill the juice so they get discarded. I remember when these USB-C vapes originally came out, we were joking that vapes got USB-C before the iPhone did.
It feels like we’ve turned every physical object into a distributed system with firmware updates, a network stack, and a failure mode that requires rebooting your house. All that compute just to do the same job the purely mechanical version did for decades, except now it can also crash.
I to wait for the deposable vape robotic uprising.
Hosting A Website On A Disposable Vape
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/15/hosting-a-website-on-a-dispo...
I remember the good old days when a "vape" was just a sturdy housing for a rechargable battery, some heating wire, cotton and juice. The power was determined by the resistance of the coils you built. Those things would last forever.
Until people started launching them into the ceiling...
It being activated by microphones makes me think you could add speakers to this tiny format and make a tiny digital instrument that's influenced by blow intensity etc.
Suck.
Is this the "John Graham-Cumming", ex-CTO of cloudflare?
Yes, that's me.
yes! F9 on his website links to this very blog https://jgc.org/
These products are targeted towards high school teens and middle schoolers, carry a number of serious health risks, and anyone involved in making them can rot in hell.
The only realistic risk so far is addiction and a nicotine addiction doesn’t ruin lives. Other than that it’s marginally bad for the heart and so far atleast not carcinogenic.
Nicotine itself is carcinogenic in the mouth:
> Nicotine in tobacco can form carcinogenic tobacco-specific nitrosamines through a nitrosation reaction. This occurs mostly in the curing and processing of tobacco. However, nicotine in the mouth and stomach can react to form N-nitrosonornicotine, a known type 1 carcinogen, suggesting that consumption of non-tobacco forms of nicotine may still play a role in carcinogenesis
The dose in urine is 1-3% of that of cigarette smokers so it is a significant, order of magnitude decrease in risk based on the paper another GP has posted below. In the mouth the levels also seem to be an order of magnitude lower than cigarette smokers (though similar in a majority of cases). Those are relatively acceptable risks for a vice I would think.
Nicotine gets metabolised into several compounds within the human body which are carcinogenic, even if pure nicotine in itself isn't.
Cancer risk is more complex than just carcinogens. Nicotine is known to promote the growth of existing cancer cells, and in multiple ways. A big thing with cancer that not many people are aware of is that we all have cancer cells, and get new cancer cells all the time — but that the human immune system is normally effective at detecting and killing them before they have multiplied too much. Old cancer mutations can lay dormant or kept in check for many years, but if promoted and/or the immune system gets stressed or suppressed, they'd grow and you'd "get cancer".
Different types of E-juice also contain additives for flavour, and we still don't yet know the long-term effects of some of those — when ingested as vape — which is a different to being swallowed. And by long-term, I mean 20 years or more, which in some cases is the time a cancer cell can take from formation to detectable tumour.
As stated by a sibling comment, at least the carcinogenicity part isn't true. Unfortunately, even nicotine gum should be carcinogenic (and is of course not intended to be used for consumption besides of alleviating withdrawal effects).
Presence of the Carcinogen N′-Nitrosonornicotine in Saliva of E-cigarette Users: <https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.chemrestox.8b00089>
They’re better than cigarettes, so they’re the lesser evil.
You cannot say "better" in this context without an almost endless degree of quantification that could fill textbooks. By what metric? Public health? Cost effectiveness? Environmental impact? How do we measure these things? I assume you're arguing a health perspective (which, at this point all we can say is probably better), but in the context of TFA "better" is more likely to be interpreted in an environmental context, of which I haven't really been convinced either way.
They're not. The list of drugs found in them is terrifying:
https://www.unodc.org/LSS/Announcement/Details/8afbc6e8-9439...
I would argue that in the context of ops complaint they are worse.
I can't believe these are legal, especially in countries that supposedly care a lot about the environment and where people are even quite annoying about, for example, only using the "Eco Mode" on household appliances (also known as the "won't clean your dishes" mode, "won't clean your clothes properly" mode...)
Run your hot water for a few mins prior to turning on your washing machine - makes a hell of a difference, everything else being equal.
This is a really interesting topic but not a thorough article imo. I don't really understand how the 6 flavours come about, what the sucking positions the author mentions are etc. Would love it if you go into more detail. Also, now I have a very strong urge to buy one of these things and take it apart. Inspirational!
There's a rotating mouthpiece apparently https://vaping360.com/vape-products/fizzy-max-iii-6in1/
I also found it interesting that the mouthpiece position would be detected with microphones rather than any other electronic sensors.
That's such an interesting design choice. Very curious why they went with the mic approach. maybe because it was already there to sense sucking anyway.
The “interesting design choices” in these things knows no bounds… I recently came across one that had a glitter snow globe built into the side of it. Well, more of a snow hemisphere, but still so absurd.
I've seen some cool server projects running off these.
Edit: https://bogdanthegeek.github.io/blog/projects/vapeserver/
It feels so odd to think that the human which is self poisoning with an electronic device that will be neglectedly thrown on public area is not that different from the one who would diligently bring it to a trash, even curiosity didn't jump in to enjoy analysis of the device.
Reminds me of a website that's hosted on a disposable vape: https://bogdanthegeek.github.io/blog/projects/vapeserver/
I just dont understand disposable vape. It's very easy to convert one into "reuseable": Add a charging port, a cheap li-po charger ic, some mechanism to let user refill the boiler. Disposeable vape should have not existed at first place
Some of them (actually most of them where I live) are rechargeable, they're not refillable and you can't change the atomizer (wick and coil). And the most expensive part of the vape is the tax on nicotine liquid, so there is little sense to hassle with wicks and refills.
Given the environmental impact of disposable vapes (the littering was awful), some places have already implemented bans. The UK's ban came into force June 2025.
> Disposable vape should have not existed at first place
When herbal vapes for cannabis came in around 5-10 years ago, it was the catalyst that started all this. Pax are the main manufacturer of these disposable vapes and one of the first on the scene to push THC following with nicotine. These were originally expensive, bulky and seen as an luxury item. I bought one, an DeVinci Ascent, I loved it.
I used it to hide that I was smoking cannabis from my parents and all the opportunities to walk the families dog and get high were wasted by playing CS:S and getting high. Teenage-hood for you.
Coil driven vapes are a different ball-game. Require actual human intervention and know-how. They are refillable in a sensible way, coils need replacing and I've seen some very cool rigs.
A USB port is pointless if you know that the user isn't going to refill the cart. If you can produce the device cheaply and not get taxed for the environmental waste. Add the R&D costs, additional safety, additional materials for the tank. What do you do with the now empty toxic tank? There are additional costs for stocking vape shops to refill the liquid. The latter is a more sustainable business option than the former.
They know the playbook. They would much prefer for you to be out with mates, stop off at a newsagents, pick up some chemical brain-rotting Dragon Soup and grab an elf-bar. Act like a twat outside of the venue and then throw it on the ground. Anything to do with vaping is foul-play. The Alcohol biz is tightly knitted with the vape/smoking biz.
Disposable also gives you plausible deniability. They get in trouble, close up shop. Relabel their brand and start again.
A few years ago I saw a vape with a full display that played a pac man clone aside from the state and settings, and now I have a drawer of random vape screens and components that I swear i'm going to use one of these years.
Lemme know if you need any Altoids tins lol
After-school tech club idea: instead of just handing kids an Arduino, tell them to get their purloined vapes out of their pockets and hack 'em till you get JTAG or semixosting working.
I have used these disposable vapes before, and it saddens me that so much tech (including those batteries!) are just thrown away. Like what ever happened to reducing e-waste.
Disposable vapes waste have big environmental impact.
Use regular vapes with e-juice
It upsets me that disposable vapes are not more prohibited. Where I live I often find vapes discarded in parks and other areas where they can be a fire hazard.
here in Greece you find it everywhere. I personally use the traditional e-juice vape to minimize waste.
That is a lot! But that's also an expensive vape, with way more tech than cheap ones. Here you can get one for ~10 Euro, and they are NOT rechargeable or anything.
Doesn't look like SMD was great. This looks like lowest cost has gone back to .. rows of people with a soldering iron patching the cheapest possible flow process.
I found a discarded working vape that had a complete working game system (screen with controls) built-in... a very attractive package to small kids.
It's beyond ridiculous, it's rechargeable but not refillable. As if a silicon tap was more difficult to design than a USB charging port.
Can it run Doom?
Also, it's fun to imagine someone building whole racks of these (e.g. recycled ones) for a computation farm. Or a cheap home server, whatever.
> Can it run Doom?
Yes, there are even videos showing it on youtube.
Does anyone remember when e-cigarettes first came out and they were intended to be a stop smoking aid? That didn’t last long!
What do you mean? Smoking rate have certainly declined since vapes have been a thing.
I think if you take smokers and nicotine vapers combined, it has probably gone way up
That is a very different statistic.
Slightly deranged but serious question: what vape would be the easiest to convert/Frankenstein it into a Meshtastic node?
I can't believe this things even have microphones in them! That's a crazy amount of tech just to end up as e-waste.
Probably because the cost of adding it is low. If you already have an I2S capable MCU then adding a microphone is fairly low hanging fruit.
And they have little displays on them, OLED displays which show the battery life and remaining fluid.
See also
Hosting a WebSite on a Disposable Vape https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45252817
Hugged to death atm I guess
There’s more computing power in a disposable vape than in the Apollo Guidance Computer???
Yes, but there’s exponentially less talent on the engineering team
So who is going to make some mesh firmware for these and all other garbage computers?
Put it this way, from engineering and technology perpective vape is equivalent to generalization of smoking tools (cigarette, pipe, etc). Naturally it's a very complex as a system and no small feat because you are going to generalize relativity and AI, for examples general relativity and AGI, respectively.
Amazing that they use a microphone array to sense the position of the suction.
I haven't seen one in years, are they still legal?
this is a minor reason I like disposable vapes - have seen myself teenagers tinkering with them. has potential to teach a lot
What a waste of precious resources
Alternate take: Is this really "a ridiculous amount of tech", or just "how things are today"?
At one point in history aluminum and other alloys were considered pretty cutting edge. As was in-house electricity and plumbing. Now, those things are just everyday stuff that gets no special regard.
When you can build disposable computers at scale for pennies, it might not be "tech" anymore in the sense of cutting edge things, and instead it's just "an average Tuesday".
Both are true. Today we get a ridiculous amount of tech for <$1.
ESP32 has a compute power of a PC from the early '90s (it can run Quake!), in addition to having wireless connectivity you couldn't even buy back then.
I knew it was vapor ware.
Cyberpunk is real.
Can it run doom?
Such terrible waste of technology and environmental resources. Gotta be a better way. Maybe no vaping and some sort of paper patches instead?
It's wild to think about the e-waste implications of this. We are effectively throwing away a basic smartphone's worth of complexity and lithium every week.
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Sounds like you're whining to be fair.
Please have a read:
https://pirg.org/resources/vape-waste-the-environmental-harm...
Edit: You were complaining about 'environmental' HN users, but now you've edited your comment. I guess you read the article and were convinced, that's great :)
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It's hard to take these vape teardowns seriously when they call Propyleenglycol, nictotine salts, and flavors "poison".
It's truly a marvel of anti-scientific thinking.
There's a ridiculous amount of tech in the DNA and cellular machinery of a single bacterium.
When you poo though it doesnt require landfill and relatively less toxic.
Where do you think it goes?
In the ocean.
The water from sewage might end up there after it's extracted and sanitized, but all the solids have to be disposed of too. Those solids, plus the leftover chemicals used to extract and sanitize the water, go to landfill.
It's not rediculous if you look at this through a modern lens. In reality this tech is cheap. Trying to keep it around is hoarder mentality. You are stockpiling garbage which can be cheaply replaced.
I think recycling and upcycling are good practices. With them, you can build missile, drone tracking systems and water irrigation systems, smartwear and other control for almost nothing.
Which is why when folks nowadays say "you cannot use XYZ for embedded", given what most embedded systems look like, and what many of us used to code on 8 and 16 bit home computers, I can only assert they have no idea how powerful modern embedded systems have become.
Now that it is a pity that when people talk about saving the planet everyone keeps rushing to dispoable electronics, what serves me to go by bycicle to work, be vegetarian, recicle my garbage, if everyone is dumping tablets, phones and magnificient thin laptops into the ground, and vapes of course.
> Which is why when folks nowadays say "you cannot use XYZ for embedded", given what most embedded systems look like, and what many of us used to code on 8 and 16 bit home computers, I can only assert they have no idea how powerful modern embedded systems have become.
Yet, I still need to wait about 1 second (!) after each key press when buying a parking ticket and the machine wants me to enter my license plate number. The latency is so huge I initially thought the machine was broken. I guess it’s not the chip problem but terrible programming due to developers thinking they don’t need to care about performance because their chip runs in megahertz.
There's no pressure to make a good product because nobody making this decision has to use the machine. Everywhere I've worked purchase decisions are made by somebody with no direct contact to the actual usage, maybe if you're lucky they at least asked the people who need the product what the requirements are, otherwise it's just whatever they (who don't use this product) thought would be good.
"Key presses are 15x slower than they should be" gets labelled P5 low priority bug report, whereas "New AI integration to predict lot income" is P0 must-fix because on Tuesday a sales guy told a potential customer that it'd be in the next version and apparently the lead looked interested so we're doing it.
Interesting story; I went to park at a downtown lot in my local city (Vancouver BC) and the machine had an unusual UI. So I skipped the machine and scanned the QR code for the app. By the time I had taken the elevator up to the lobby of the building I had the app.
But then the usability on the app was so bad, that I actually could not figure out how to buy parking. The instructions were clear, but the latency on the app was unusable. The Internet connection was fine. It was the app. So I skipped the whole thing, went to dinner, and was happy when I found my car without a ticket.
"Unable to buy a ticket" would have been an interesting day in court.
> Paying more for programmers or parking machine processors would be a waste of money.
The rise of parking apps on mobile adds an interesting angle to this.
No doubt, many of us favour apps because the UX is so much better. Not quite sure if that affects the bottom line short-term, but long-term I’m sure it will.
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> There's no pressure to make a good product because nobody making this decision has to use the machine.
Most software sucks, even when people have to chose using it. Everything is buggy and slow, people are just used to software being bad.
I worked at a purchasing dept. where each commonly ordered part or service had a six digit item number that had to be entered. The CFO picked some company to do the new version of the software, and they decided to randomly assign new different item numbers which included 13 leading zeros to each item number. So now everyone had to learn the new item numbers and type in a the 13 leading zeros each time.
Precisely this. We love to put our colleagues as competent victims of the system, but a competent engineer is unlikely to build an embeeded UI with high latency at their first try. It's a combination of cheap, underqualified labour and careless management.
To paraphrase Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to prioritize something when his salary depends upon his not prioritizing it.”
This is only partially true.
If developers prioritize customer experience instead of velocity and cost in situations where that isn't warranted, the company they work for can no longer sell products as cheaply as their competitors do. This decreases their market share and their revenue, which means they'll employ fewer developers in the future.
This is almost an evolutionary process, many (but not all) markets choose for developers which don't care about such things.
> When it comes to the actual quality of the software written, the buck stops at the developer. Blame can be shared.
No. The quality is not prioritized by management. A dev that fails to ship a feature because they were trying to improve "quality" gets fired.
We have no labor power because morons spent the good times insisting that we don't need a professional organization to solve the obvious collective action problem.
You mean the developer hired by (and fired by) management?
Everyone was locked out in a building am staying at (40 something stories) for several hours. When I asked the concierge if I can have a look at the system, it turns out they had none. The whole thing communicated with AWS for some subscription SaaS that provided them with a front-end to register/block cards. And every tap anywhere (elevators/doors/locks) in the building communicated back with this system hosted on AWS. Absolute nightmare.
Easier maybe. But significantly worse. Parts of these systems have been build and engineered to be entirely reliable with automatic hand-overs when some component fails or with alternative routings when some connection is lost.
>than having to buy hardware to put somewhere in the building (with redundant power, cooling, etc.), and have someone deploy, install, manage, update, etc. all of that.
You don't need any of that. You need one more box in the electrical closet and one password protected wifi for all the crap in the building (the actual door locks and the like) to connect to.
Its absolutely possible to have both a SaaS based control plane and continue functioning if the internet connection/control plane becomes unavailable for a period. There's presumably hardware on site anyway to forward requests to the servers which are doing access control, it wouldn't be difficult to have that hardware keep a local cache of the current configuration. Done that way you might find you can't make changes to who's authorised while the connection is unavailable, but you can still let people who were already authorised into their rooms.
> with redundant power, cooling, etc
The doors the system controls don't have any of this. Hell, the whole building doesn't have any of this. And it definitely doesn't have redundant internet connections to the cloud-based control plane.
This is fear-mongering when a passive PC running a container image on boot will suffice plenty. For updates a script that runs on boot and at regular intervals that pulls down the latest image with a 30s timeout if it can't reach the server.
It's also easier to keep all the water for fighting fires in trucks that are remote, than to run high pressure water pipes to every room's ceilings, with special valves that only open when exposed to high heat. Imagine the overhead costs!
Cooling for a card access system?
A card access system requires zero cooling, it’s a DC power supply or AC transformer and a microcontroller that fits in a small unvented metal enclosure. It requires no management other than activating and deactivating badges.
There is no reason to have any of the lock and unlock functionality tied to the cloud, it’s just shitty engineering by a company who wants to extract rent from their customers.
The system was not built with resiliency in mind and had no care/considerations for what a shit-show will unfurl once the system or the link goes down. I wonder if exit is regulated (you can still fully exit the building from any point using the green buttons and I think these are supposed to activate/still work even if electricity is down).
> Yes, but still probably a million times easier for both the building management and the software vendor to have a SaaS for that, than having to buy hardware to put somewhere in the building (with redundant power, cooling, etc.)
A isolated building somewhere in the middle of the jungle dependent for its operation on some American data-center hundreds of miles away is simply negligence. I am usually against regulations but clearly for certain things we can trust that all humans will be reasonable.
As the parent said: “Everyone was locked out in a building am staying at (40 something stories) for several hours.”
Now I am waiting for time when they move us-east-1 physical security to run in us-east-1... Thus locking themselves out when needing some physical intervention on servers to get backup.
This is in SEA. They probably operate from ap-southeast-1 or 2. But yeah, if the internet goes down, the provider service goes down or AWS goes down they are cooked.
I wonder what happened to the building when the internet went down. How do you get into the room to reboot the router?
My first guess was debouncing. They assume that the switches are worn out, deeply weathered, and cheaply made. Each press will cause the signal to oscillate and they're taking their sweet time to register it.
When the device is new this is an absurd amount of time to wait. As the device degrades over 10, 20 years, that programming will keep it working the same. Awful the entire time, yes, but the same as the day it was new.
You need to find the right person to complain to. Here we are sympathetic, but can't do anything.
The right person is the other riders on the train - but the hard part is to frame this such that they join you on a march to the the agency that owns that machines to complain. I wish you the best of luck figuring out how to do that (I don't know how to do it - and if I did there are might higher priority things that need to be fixed).
They are running it on a Java VM in a container - on a 386?
Over WiFi?
Making API calls to a server to do button debouncing does sound like something so stupid a tech company would do it
One of the more inspired design choices of the parking ticket devices in my area is the inclusion of a key repeat feature.
If you keep your finger on the touchscreen for just long enough, it helpfully repeats the keystroke while you're entering a license plate.
Given the inevitable hardware issues, this means that what should be a single tap frequently becomes a burst of identical characters.
The programmers who worked on this probably would've liked to be game developers instead.
That's programmer incompetence. Unfortunately pervasive, especially with devices like parking meters, EV chargers, and similar, where the feedback loop (angry customer) is long (angry customers resulting in revenue decrease) or non-existent.
And nobody with options would settle for the low pay and terrible working conditions, so the quality of the output also reflects that.
I disagree — developers are not sheep.
It's a nice theory, but many of those terrible parking ticket machines predate smartphones, so it might be the case for machines built now, but it's really hard to imagine that that was the original intention
It's organizational incompetence driven by companies that see software development as a cost centre rather than a key asset.
It's usually clear when this has happened. Buggy bargain basement output.
Give it some slack, it's probably doing its best to inexplicably run windows.
Disagree. Windows for embedded runs extremely well, though can take a minute to boot.
My underpowered cash register that hadn't been updated in a decade could run POS on top of Windows 7 Embedded POSReady buttery smooth.
Occasionally they would start performing poorly, and it was always a network issue.
Or maybe they think they should be sending each keystroke to a server and waiting for the response.
Na each key press goes to a separate lambda invocation that gets submitted to a Kafka queue, and what happens after that is a mystery to all involved.
We can make crazy latency ourselves just fine, no space transmission necessary
Probably a Celeron-powered PC tower barely keeping up with Windows Server 2008 R2 in a closet of a public office ;)
Gotta have multiple AZs.
The server is probably running Python
Whilst I can not see a motivation I refuse to accept that parking machines are not advisarial design. Why do they have haf a dozen things that look a bit like tap n pay if they are not trying to make it eaiser for card skimmers.
And the self service kiosks/checkouts at supermarkets. So infuriating! Like I'd have to try to make something that slow myself on purpose!
Besides the fact that scanning a barcode seems beyond much of the general population, they do it so sloooow.
Some of these are just dumb terminals with the entire state handled on a server. I've seen a bunch of them freeze at once where no UI would respond (but the interactions were buffered) and then when the network hiccup was over they all unfroze and reflected the input.
I think that's handled by the barcode scanner itself, at least on the ones I've used. The scanner will not recognize the same code immediately, but will immediately pick up a different code.
What's slow is that after each scan it needs to check the weight which means it lets the scales settle for one second before accepting another scan.
Idt that's it, at least in my experience.
I scan as fast as a manned checkout (I did my time in retail). And I can scan my groceries at the speed whilst the people next to me spend most of their time rotating an item to find the barcode.
I found that checkouts in Belarus in cheap store are terrible. Checkouts in Latvia in cheap shop are slightly better.
Checkout in Rimi, premium Danish store are superb. Work well, UI clean and clear. No ads, no excessive clicks.
Only in America. America is deigned to make you mad that public common life isn't keeping up with whats in everybody's pocket.
Gently forcing the individual to choose sapient or insentient.
Sorry to rant, but this kind of stuff is the only thing that triggers me. It's gotten so bad that my family makes me put a dollar in a 'complain jar' everytime I talk about how poor quality software has become.
Just one recent example: few months ago, I replaced a Bosch dishwasher with the latest version of the same model. Now, when I press the start button to initiate the cycle, it takes over 3 seconds for it to register! Like, what is going on in that 3 seconds?
How was it possible that even 'kind of good' developers like me were able todo much more with much less back in the 90s? My boss would be like, "Here's this new hardware thingy and the manual. Now figure out how to do the impossible by Monday." Was it because we had bigger teams, more focus, fewer dependencies?
I think we've been trained to accept bad software at this point, and a lot of people don't know anything different.
I suspect that a lot of it is caused by shoving Android onto underpowered devices because it is cheap and seems like an easy button. But I don't know for sure, that's just an impression. I have no numbers.
Could there be an opportunity here, for a specialized kiosk OS or something like that?
It could also be intentional UX design. Or a result of the keyboard hardware.
What can you expect, when people assume as normal shipping the browser alongside the "native" application, and scripting languages using an interpreter are used in production code?
Maybe that ticket machine was coded in MicroPython. /s
I worked on a startup that was mostly powered by Tcl, the amount of rewriting in C that we had to do between 1999 and 2003, when I left the company among all those dotcom busts, made me no longer pick any language without at least a JIT, for production code.
The founders went on creating OutSystems, with the same concepts but built on top of .NET, they are one of the most successful Portuguese companies to this day, and one of the few VB like development environments for the Web.
Classic Forth Dimensions article: Why Forth Isn't Slow
* https://www.forth.org/fd/FD-V06N5.pdf
Basically it is because Forth programs are fairly flat and don't go deep into subfunctions. So the interpreter overhead is not that great and the processor spends most of the time running the machine code that underlays the primitives that live at the bottom of the program.
Some Forths are dog slow such as PFE compared to GForth. Meanwhile others running in really slow platforms such as subleq (much faster in muxleq) run really fast for that the VM actually as (almost something slightly better than a 8086).
It's not really "interpreted", in the way that for example BASIC or Java is.
It's a list of jumps to functions.
Anything that makes the world worse for car drivers is a huge bonus for The planet.
Plastic bottles are discarded because they can be replaced at low cost. Disposable vapes are possible because batteries became cheap enough: the chip is a rounding error.
The same market forces that gave us affordable electric vehicles gave us disposable vapes.
If it goes anything like plastic bottles, there will be a bitter fight for corporate accountability that goes nowhere. It’s especially difficult here because there isn’t a single monopoly like Coca-cola to hold responsible. What is the bottle bill equivalent for vapes?
Be heartened that your choices are meaningful. The impact of e-waste on ground contamination from landfills in the United States and Europe is negligible, and landfill capacity itself does not approach the level of emergency that planetary warming is for human civilizations.
Bicycling, transit usage, and switching to lower-carbon food sources significantly reduces your CO2 footprint. Your example influences others in your community, though it may not be personally apparent.
It is pretty hard to be a vegetarian in the US and eat low carbon food. If you grow it yourself or only buy from tiny farms maybe. AG in the US is petroleum based top to bottom.
Since all inputs to animals are coming from fertilizer-based crops, by definition meat is an order of magnitude more carbon intensive than simply eating plants.
Unless you assert that most animal feed is significantly less carbon intense than plants grown for human consumption, this holds. While grazing animals do exist, the vast majority of animal feed is farmed.
The idea that people are smoking arm chips makes me laugh.
Not smoking, vaping - better for your health but not RISC free.
Hey man, RISC architecture is gonna change everything
RISC is good.
it's literal vaporware
This is your brain. This is your brain on ARM.
Technical Boy's vape is here: https://giphy.com/gifs/americangods-vape-american-gods-26BGN...
Something I recently found out about ARM Cortex M0s, they are small enough and cheap enough that they get used in USB cables to handle protocol negotiation between devices.
Given that the moon lander had a 1Mhz processor and 4kb of ram means we landed on the moon with the compute power of a Vape or USB cable. Wild times indeed.
It also stood out to me how little stuff is in there - there's the uC itself, 3 transistors for heating the flavor canisters, an op-amp for the microphones, but other than that I don't really see anything - no external oscillator, no vrm (though a charger/BMS circuit must be in there somewhere).
I see lots more cost-cutting corners they could take...
Vapes are probably made in enough quantity to warrant custom silicon. Then the mosfets and charge circuit could be on the same die. It could be mounted COB (black blob).
They could probably use a single 'microphone' (pressure sensor) and determine which setting based on a photodiode.
The PCB's could be replaced with a flex PCB which integrates the heating elements (Vegetable Glycerine boils at 290C, whereas Polyimide can do 400C for a short while). Construction of the whole device can then involve putting the PCB inside the injection moulding machine for the cavities, eliminating all assembly steps, joints and potential leaks, and reducing part count
> Vapes are probably made in enough quantity to warrant custom silicon
Not when the MCUs might cost a penny and the other parts aren’t much more.
Putting high power electronics and analog into the same custom silicon as a custom digital logic is nontrivial. They’re made on different processes.
If simplicity is the goal, then sure: Maybe spinning up a custom part can become useful.
But simplicity isn't always the goal. I have a throwaway vape here with a color LCD screen that plays full-motion animations.
To be sure, that's not necessary at all. But this functionality does exist, and people do buy them.
IIRC, they're said to use a 48MHz Cortex M0 part. More information here: https://github.com/ginbot86/ColorLCDVape-RE
> But you need very very little digital logic...
Right, which they already get from a $0.01 MCU
Combining an MCU and multi-amp power transistors into the same package is expensive.
> I love the term “high power” even though we are talking maybe a watt or two when that bad boy’s element is doing its thing!
Your estimate is 1-2 orders of magnitude too low. Small vapes pull a couple amps, as I understand it. Larger vapes can pull over 50-100W. The modded ones into the 200W range. These things can use more power than most CPUs for the brief moment they're on.
The power draw is so high that vape fans compare and review batteries to show which ones can sustain the most power output.
It's an unexpected boon for those of us who use batteries for other things: The vape craze has made more high current batteries available with a lot of user contributed test data.
Vape wattages are more like 15 watts, which is an awful lot for a battery smaller than the tip of your pinkie! I believe the power density (not energy density) of those batteries is market leading.
There are many, many, many different types and designs of vapes. There are plentiful ASICS on the market specifically for vapes and e-cigarettes.
The cheapest variety is a tiny PCB built into the microphone. It's three wires for the battery and heater, and that's it. Sometimes they include a cheap and nasty battery charger. All in a single grain of sand for almost free.
The vape is disposable, no need for a charging circuit and maybe a simple ADC to determine battery life based on a discharge curve.
Apparently there is a charging circuit, because the battery will run out long before the fluid does
I always felt those Off-Stamps were at least a bit better than other disposables since the battery portion was at least reusable.
How close are we to smart dust I wonder? How small can we make wireless communications?
> How close are we to smart dust I wonder? How small can we make wireless communications?
There's two limiting factors for 'smart dust': power (batteries are the majority weight and volume of this vape), and antennae (minimum size determined by wavelength of carrier wave).
I believe you can fit an NFC module in a 5x5mm package, but that does externalize the power supply.
We are going to have to rethink power for smart dust. Like consider that no creature out there is powered by batteries. From the biggest land animal to the smallest microbe it’s all chemistry.
Maybe the smart dust will have to eat microbes and stuff to stay active.
As for communication, we can’t go shoving antennas in them as then they’d be larger than dust. And you can’t use the optical part of the spectrum because of interference with basically everything. You can’t use wavelengths smaller either as you get into UV and high radiation. There is the terahertz radio spectrum [0] between 3mm and 30um that is pretty open and not utilized at all because we haven’t figured out how to make good transmitters. Plus the spectrum isn’t very useful as it isn’t very penetrating and water vapor absorbs it… and it requires lots of power.
Smart dust might have to be more of a distributed computer or something. Or a micro machine that uses chemistry and mechanical magic to do its operations.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terahertz_radiation
> From the biggest land animal to the smallest microbe it’s all chemistry.
Batteries are chemistry. ATP is a chemical battery.
The difference between living things and our machines is primarily in manufacturing methods: we do things in bulk, because we reach from the top with crude, meter-scale tools; nature glues things up from lots of tiny biomolecular nanomachines, and each of those tiny machines has to carry its own power source!
Still, it's highly likely that any form of "smart dust" will resemble living cells as much as, or even more so, it will resemble miniature devices we build today, simply because that's the kind of chemistry that's efficient at smaller scales.
RFID tags are powered wirelessly, one could imagine powering smaller particles when operating on higher frequencies (RFID is on 13.something MHz requiring relatively large coils). A directional antenna could send a pulsed beam to power a subset of the particles in the area and afterwards receive their signals.
So... smart dust powered by the sun? Cool!
Okay if you take dust literally. The important part is that the particles fly. Like dandelion seeds.
> There's two limiting factors for 'smart dust': power
RFID is historically powered by one of three methods,
one of which is completely wireless/battery-free.
The Z80 didn't even do 8 bit add. The ALU operates in two 4 bit cycles.
I am now wondering if it's possible to put a ZX81 emulator on one of these microcontrollers. It would need to emulate the Z80 but you've got plenty of spare cycles, and 3x the ROM and RAM of the original, so enough space for a small emulator!
For the even cheaper e-cigarettes many vendors are producing dedicaded ASICS integrating heater control, pressure sensing, battery management, for as close to free as it gets. It's astonishing.
It's all integrated on a tiny PCB mounted to the back of the microphone.
What a world we live in; we have gotten to a point where computers are so small and cheap that they can literally be “disposable”.
It’s beautiful, I love it.
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...
> 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.
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.
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.
To make matters worse, recycling is a scam (with a small handful of exceptions).
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).
> "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.
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.
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).
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
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.)
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.
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.
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.
Let's start by pricing in the negative externalities.
>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.
It reminds me of how Sussman talked about someday we'd have computers so small and cheap that we'd mix dozens in our concrete and be put throughout our space.
Russia started with mixing diodes into concrete a while ago- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41933979
A Deepness in the Sky by Vinge has this as a minor plot point.
> It’s beautiful
Especially since both the waste created in the process of making the device and the e-waste created with it's disposal are somebody else's problem!
> It’s beautiful, I love it.
When computers become disposable, their programmers soon become disposable as well. Maybe, you shouldn't love it.
That doesn't make sense.
Life lessons from anime and the WordPorn meme account.
> These are 32-bit ARM Cortex M0 MCUs, running at a 24 MHz clock or similar, some with 24 KB of ROM and maybe 3 KB of RAM!
So, probably enough to land on the moon. And cheap enough to justify a dozen backups.
> [...] while the cost of the processor is 2 - 3 orders of magnitudes less.
Is that inflation adjusted? If not, the real cost difference is even starker.
This is exactly it. The tech in these sorts of devices is way overpowered for what they are or need simply because it's a lot cheaper to do it that way than it would be to use more appropriately scaled computing power. Either the "more appropriate" components are no longer in production, or they are in production but are now considered somewhat niche and are only produced in volumes that make them considerably more expensive than the more advanced/powerful options.
So you end up with something that could probably be coaxed into running DOOM at playable FPS (if it had enough RAM and a display) relegated to running a humble - and frankly objectionably wasteful (coupled with questionable health outcomes with long term use) - disposable vape.
Nowsdays computers misguided us to think that we need to measure RAM in GB and storage in TB. There are a lot of "invisible" applications running on 8bit MCU (not ARM based and more modern than ZX80) and few kB of flash and a bunch of RAM (64 bytes in luxury models). In this context matter more the integrated peripherals like ADC, DAC, PWM, etc that simplify the complexity of board and reduce the total cost.
"Microcontrollers like the Puya PY32 Series (e.g., PY32C642, PY32F002/F030) can cost in the $0.02 - $0.05 range"
LCSC says between 6 and 8 cents in volume:
https://www.lcsc.com/product-detail/C5292058.html
500+ $ 0.0802 2,500+ $ 0.0727 5,000+ $ 0.0682"
Wow: the Sinclair ZX81 launched in the UK in 1981 for around £49.95 as a kit (£50) and £69.95 assembled, making it incredibly cheap, and later in the US as the Timex Sinclair 1000 for $99.95 (kit) or $149.95 (assembled)
Cheap for a 1980s computer, now pennies. Wild.
idea for a hobby project for someone better versed in hw than me - create a computer that can at least run basic with the MCU from the disposable vape.. :)
first one to run doom on a vape would do great numbers on youtube
Already been done.
Not doom, but (sorta) a website https://hackaday.com/2025/09/15/hosting-a-website-on-a-dispo...
Looks like I was probably wrong about this. There are a lot of "doom running on a vape" videos on YouTube - very easy to find, that's what search is for - but the best primary source I could find quickly actually has doom running separately and the vape just being used as a display.
Search for something like "doom on Puya PY32"
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/20/when-low-sram-keeps-the-doom...
https://github.com/atc1441/Vape_DOOM_ScreenShare
It's a god damn vape, 3Kb of ram is already a massive overkill for the purpose.
I've bought hundreds of Puya's for my lab stock on LCSC. Neat little things!
How usable are they for hacking? I've had bad experiences with more obscure chips requiring custom programmers/debuggers.
They're great, because you can use all standard ARM tooling, including CMSIS-DAP dongles for debugging.
> What an amazing time we live in!
I feel like, pioneers of the past would be rather disappointed with us.
I mean, primarily we're not using this ridiculous power to solve actual problems, but to enslave one another in addiction, mindless consumption and manufactured consent to a lesser life.
Almost 100 years later, now with computer enabled misinformation and agitation campaigns by tech oligarchs, a new fascism is on the rise and Alan Turing would be called an abomination, again.