So so, electronic waste landing everywhere while illusion of closed loop electronic recycling is being sold as a solution. My proposition: deposit of 25€ for small electrical devices and 50€ and more for bigger ones so that these do not land in landfills.
This kind of solution is absolutely what's required. Two addendums:
First, make the deposit a function of battery size not item size or cost (small battery $5 deposit, medium battery $10, large $50). This way the environmental cost of a specific battery is linked to the consumer's cost in a way that it isn't really now when the variation in battery cost is swallowed up in the cost of the item itself.
Second, peg this deposit to inflation. 20 years ago the 5c deposit on a beer can meant a lot more than it does today. I'm old enough to remember my fairly well off grandparents saving up their cans and returning them. Today, nobody I know bothers.
That has a) nothing to do with the topic at hand (improving recycling rates) anr b) isn't even effective. A deposit isn't a tax. You need to give the consumer money for actually bringing the product to a recycling spot, so a tax doesn't help. Psychological it's a better motivator if that money was originally paid by the consumer as in you're losing money you paid, if you don't bring it back, and it's also much easier to implement.
If you want to tax non-replaceable batteries that will just be factored into the price and the thing is that easily replaceable batteries are in conflict with other design goals consumers are willing to pay for (like water proofness).
I understand the frustration with non-replaceable batteries creating some kind of planned obsolescence, but there is no easy solution without sacrificing other things.
Have you ever hired a car before? You pay for the time you have the car, and you also pay a certain amount as a "deposit". This is money that the rental place keeps, and when you bring the car back undamaged they give you the deposit back. If you damage the car, you don't get your deposit back.
This is the same idea.
Buy a device with a battery, pay some small amount as a deposit, get your deposit back when you bring it back for recycling.
So when I go buy a device, I pay some extra amount, enforced by the state. I can then get that back (a deposit, or dare I say, refund), when I return the battery.
I'm not saying I don't like the idea, but this is a tax with a different name. And we haven't even gotten to how someone pays for the infrastructure for all this battery cleanup.
I have to say, it seems ridiculous that we're at the point where people are dying in Europe this week from a heatwave exacerbated by climate change, and we're not even implementing basic measures like this yet.
How much contribution does "electronics with non-replaceable batteries" add to climate change? 10%? 1%? 0.1%? Bringing this up when talking about climate change is like bringing up plastic straws bans in first world countries when talking about microplastic pollution (ie. ignoring the fact that half of microplastics in the ocean comes from fishing gear).
You’ve got to start somewhere though. And anywhere is marginally better than nowhere. As opposed to throwing your arms up in the air saying “it’s pointless we should be doing something else instead so let’s do nothing at all”. That’s exactly what the industry is aiming for, learned helplessness.
Nope, this is completely wrong. People want to help but they have limited bandwidth. When you give them someway they can feel like they are helping without meaningfully doing anything, you’ve reduced their attention/effort that will go into real solutions.
Doing minuscule shit is absolutely harmful to the cause. This is one of those areas where a compromise is as bad as doing nothing with the additional downside of patting yourself on the back thinking you made progress.
I know a woman who regularly drives almost an hour round trip to the recycling center for plastics, as our village does not have plastic recycling bins. She's certain that she is doing her part, and absolutely does not want to hear that recycling plastic emits more CO2 than creating new plastic, nevermind the fuel she's burned.
Though driving an hour to recycle a few plastic bottles is obviously bonkers, I do want to point out that there are more reasons to recycle than just reducing CO2.
This isn't (just) about landfill space or resource availability.
It's a shame that a couple of generations have been led to believe that the only real environmental disaster is climate change. It's certainly a big and pressing one, but it's like we've all but forgotten the many other issues that our lifestyle of ready massive consumption has caused.
Some examples of other environmental impacts that 'reduce, reuse and recycle' helps with: the impact of mining and oilfield operations on the natural environment; heavy metals and other toxins in waterways from mining and badly managed landfills; microplastics in the ocean; acid rain from Nox/Sox emissions; many other forms of air pollution from the mining industry.
Technically it's more generally atmospheric 'green-house gases', of which CO2 is the one we produce massive amounts of.
Methane and Nitrous Oxide also play a massive role. We produce less of those mostly through gas leaks and shipping/diesel fuel but they are a lot worse than CO2 if we think of it in terms of per kilo impact.
My argument against minimally effective action is that it can make people feel like they did something significant, and therefore discourage further change. Those plastic straws effective function in our society isn't that it removes plastic waste, it just absolves us of responsibility by letting us say we tried
Okay, but what makes you think that interventions like "forcing manufacturers to make electronics have replaceable batteries" are easier to implement than other interventions like "invest in renewable energy projects"? Taking the approach of jumping at every possible intervention that is vaguely relevant (eg. today it's batteries in electronics because of this thread, tomorrow it's banning single use plastics because of some thread about recycling being a lie) seems worse because there won't ever be enough political will/support to get any single project implemented.
> That’s exactly what the industry is aiming for, learned helplessness.
I am wholely in agreement with you but there are some pretty big percentage wise holes that we need to plug.
Namely:
1. Getting ride of coal and Natural Gas power generation (which means replacing with renewables +storage, or fission, none of which are easily deployable)
2. Stopping methane leaks in Oil&Gas pipelines and active/decomissioned wells.
No, "starting small" and other consumer side activism are tools actively pushed by oil companies in order to make you believe you are making a difference; so that we don't pursue actual hard hitting legislation that regulate the oil industry.
Carnival Cruise's line of ships (which contain about 50 ships) contribute the same amount of emissions as all the cars in Europe. We could make the hard descision to regulate cruise ships away or maybe everyone in Europe could stop driving altogther
Except that software is usually few devs, lots of users. Here we are all contributors to the climate. So even if we all pick something different from our neighbor, changes can be made. Typical broken reasoning arising from comparing the way world works to software development.
I wonder how much CO2 impact the CI revolution in open source really has. While I see how this is convenient, I sometimes wonder if we really need to spin up a 30min build for every PR/commit. I have never heard the community reflect on the impact it has with all the convenient cloud computing. Just spin up a ton of hosts to do your thing, yes? If you can pay for it, its OK? I guess owners of fossil-fuel consuming vehicles think the same. So, where are the environmental activists in the open source area pointing fingers at CI usage?
I have seen wildly different estimates for the origins of micro plastics from different studies.
The obvious issues are plastics breakdown at wildly different rates so the ratios of plastic pollution doesn’t match the ratios seen in the ocean. There are significant differences in where each type of plastic enters the ocean and where it ends up so sampling different parts of the ocean results in different observations. Finally sizes vary widely so measuring by volume, piece, or weight gives different results.
On top of this it’s not always easy to say the actual origin of a given piece was.
As the aphorism goes "a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step".
Seems like you'll only do things that make a significant contribution. Yes, with drinking straws it was a symbolic action, and yes you risk people thinking "ok, done it". But the current alternative is no action at all. We need to start, take the first small steps before chastising ourselves for not having gone any miles yet.
Sorry, what else is being done about disposable electronics containing lithium cells? Could you recommend a news story (UK specific, preferably) with details of other projects in the context of the OP. Fwiw, I don't doubt that I'm not aware of every environmental project in this space. Thanks.
Then the first step is one of transit/bike paths, removing beef and milk from your diet, or improving your insulation to at least rsi 5. Repairability is a major issue, but a minor tweak like that is a finger in the dam. More effective would be mandating schematics and extending default warranties to include third party repair for 5 years or so.
Net zero means net zero. Batteries are going to be a huge part of our future and we need sustainable approaches to managing them right now and even more later.
Gerry McGovern's "World Wide Waste" (podcast, book and site) is a
great place to start learning about the real impact of our electronic
world on our environment.
This problem does not seem straightforward. Making have replaceable batteries and preserving their existing functionality (eg. thinness, water resistance) doesn't seem easy, nor does convincing the population to accept worse phones when most people are on a 2 year upgrade cycle.
If convincing people to not replace their phone every two years, or accept one that's a little thicker is too difficult, then I suspect we're in big trouble.
It's not really the cost, it's the cost/benefit ratio. I think most people would be on board with their sleek smartphones reverting to brickphones if it meant climate change was solved once and for all, but making the same sacrifice to reduce climate change by 0.1% would be a tough sell.
I'm in Ireland, they seem pretty popular here. Especially with those who are barely old enough to buy them.
Personally I'd be comfortable seeing them banned - for the same reason we banned the sale of individual cigarettes. Their only role in the market is to make addiction accessible at the lowest barrier to entry.
You might have to forgive them, if they’re talking about their folks with the ear marked “20 years” they’re likely old like me and think that means 1970. Us old folks tend to think “20 years ago” means 20 years before 1990’s. It’s a common mental flub.
That would make the inflation value closer to $0.38 in today’s money. It’s not a lot, but when you’re getting almost 8x the amount for each can, it adds up.
It is 3X, and when it's per can that does add up to a significant amount. That would add $1.20 to a 12-pack case, which usually cost just $6 here (admittedly a state that doesn't do deposits).
Bottle deposits were a thing in the 1970s when I was a kid. Those bottles were heavy glass, made to be returned, washed, and re-used many times. I'm not sure it was legislated however, I think it was just what the local bottlers did to get their bottles back.
1976 for Michigan(and 10c at that). My mom and I used to save every can when we lived in MI, I remember doing the deposits, and thought it was crazy that we were getting money for that.
Glass bottles have 8 Cent deposit in Germany and plastic bottles/tin cans have 25 Cent. I rarely ever not bring a plastic bottle or can back, but I do let glass bottles stand around near garbage cans for the bottle collectors.
I see the same behavior among many others. It's just anecdotal, but that 3x seems to make a huge difference.
I was definitely remembering events that happened in the mid-90s as 20 years ago. So, according to the CPI, 1995->2002 (27 years ago, good god) $0.05 -> $0.09
That $0.04 doesn't sound like much, but say you were collecting enough cans to make $50/day in 1995 money (560 cans) - now you're making only $28 a day. That's the difference between having a home and being homeless.
It's also the difference between "worth saving up and taking a trip to the return center" and "meh, chuck em". Though at least the latter helps people trying to collect more than 500 cans a day.
A deposit isn’t a tax, it’s an incentive to make sure that a renewable stays in the cycle instead of ending up in the environment. Return it and you get your money back.
It also provides an effective income for those disadvantaged enough; if the five cent deposit on cans had increased with inflation there'd still be an incentive to do it.
Sadly, this is not very practical. A lithium cell in itself is a chemical time bomb: if it gets mechanically damaged or short-circuited, it has enough oomph to burn your device, skin or house. For factory-produced battery packs this effect is mitigated by having protective circuits that monitor charge level, temperature and a bunch of other parameters, cutting off the power if the cell is deemed too dangerous. But once you take a random lithium cell off the street and try to revitalize it, you are opening a can of worms: depending on how it was used, it might be full of dendrites [0], ready to cause a fiery short-circuit a few charges after. It might have structural damage due to gas buildup, or someone literally stepping on it. It could have been under direct sunlight for longer than it should, and so on.
It's fine to tinker around with it for your own experiments, but you don't want to ship it to anybody who's not going to be using it in a fireproof lab wearing eye protection.
A better idea would be to find a way to properly recycle the raw materials (i.e. extract the lithium from a dead cell), but that could be several orders of magnitude more challenging.
> But once you take a random lithium cell off the street and try to revitalize it, you are opening a can of worms: depending on how it was used, it might be full of dendrites [0], ready to cause a fiery short-circuit a few charges after. It might have structural damage due to gas buildup, or someone literally stepping on it. It could have been under direct sunlight for longer than it should, and so on.
Yeah exactly what I was thinking.. I'm sure the cells used in these disposable devices weren't exactly the cream of the crop in manufacturing either. Probably cells that didn't pass QC or something.
It's pretty risky messing around with them like that.
On the contrary, I bet these cells are perfectly good cells (initially, after sitting on the side of the road they should definitely be considered dangerous). Remember that "a completely functional lithium battery pack, sometimes with charging and protection circuitry" is sold pre-charged as a "top up" pack for mobile phones and meant to be thrown away after.
Lithium batteries are absurdly cheap, and it's not too expensive to buy essentially off the shelf, rated capacity and lifetime cells in order to be reasonably sure 99% of your products last for 99% of their rated puffs.
If your disposable vape doesn't produce as much as competitors because you cheaped out on your lithium cell procurement, your competitor will happily scoop up that business as word of mouth spreads.
Well, it's not a deposit. It's a tax that manufacturers pay, which finances some make-pretend recycling options. But consumes don't use the recycling options and the electronics still end up on landfills.
A deposit means you get it back when you return the material to a recycling facility. The Recycling levy in Canada is just charged on the sale, and that’s the end of it. If you choose to throw the battery in the ocean instead of the appropriate recycle bin, you get just as much money back.
I thought the parents suggestion was that the consumer pays 25 Euro and receive them back when recycling the electronic device. Like... a deposit on bottles.
I'm afraid this would have the opposite effect though. Instead of donating old phones or CD players, people would have them trashed to get their deposit back.
> Instead of donating old phones or CD players, people would have them trashed to get their deposit back.
Plenty of places that take e-waste right now will refurb and resell a subset of the hardware they receive. This would be no different. It's true that this would place a floor of the money required to obtain these devices, but it's not like there would suddenly no longer be used devices for sale.
I think as soon as you add a monetary value, people think something like "I don't need the $25, I'll just put it in the trash."
People are complaining about the current state of recycling, but I save up all my lithium batteries and pay to have them recycled every few years. You can't throw that shit away.
There’s a slightly odd slightly perverse incentive at play with this though that’s particularly relevant to the article. In Canada, we have a deposit on drink cans and bottles that varies between 5 and 10 cents. Many people collect their bottles and make a quarterly or annual or whatever trip to Sarcan (recycling depot) and walk out with a cheque for $30 or so. Businesses generally have recycling bins as well and cash out on their bottles every few weeks. But there’s still a bunch of people who throw them in the trash or just litter…
The result is that homeless people are often going around collecting bottles. On garbage day, I’ll often see at least two or three people walking down the alley collecting bottles out of everyone’s bins before the garbage truck shows up. And in parks you often see homeless people rummaging around the trash cans looking for bottles, or just walking around picking them up off the ground. For the people who are too lazy to handle it themselves, we’ve (unintentionally? Maybe?) incentivized homeless people to be trash collectors and get paid for it. If the deposits were larger, guaranteed this would ramp up.
In some European countries this type of deposit is normal for plastic and glass bottles and other drinks containers, though the deposit is usually much lower (25 to 50 cents).
The impact is significant, even if it's such a low amount of money. A €25 deposit would definitely keep people from throwing out these things en masse. There will always be people who will act selfishly and against their self interest, but you've got to be pretty damn rich to throw out €25 like it's nothing.
I wouldn't call it make-pretend when you can drop electronics in any supermarket and they'll take care of recycling. I don't have statistics but anecdotally people here in Finland seem to recycle electronics as intended.
That's still more work than dropping them in the trash bin at home, or on the street. And at least here in the US where I live, while many areas have residential recycling pick-up, you can't put electronics in with that.
Where I live in Spain I just call the local solid-waste service and leave it right next to my closest recycling bin in the time frame we arrange. They collect nearly anything large, including electronics.
Only problem I've had sometimes is them calling back claiming that I left them hanging, which actually means a scrappie collected it before they arrived.
Isn't the "recycling" in those cases just "ship it to a third world country who claims they have recycling but really it's just extremely poor people taking apart electronic goods with minimal tools in what is effectively a landfill"?
I do use those options. Though I don't bring old devices to the shop but to the local government recycling center (which I trust more to actually recycle it).
Account names don't match so not sure which alt account is "you", but:
The reason what you said was dismissed/started an argument is the reason a lot of arguments start: using terms whose definitions have been overloaded. People can both be talking about "green" energy but mean entirely different things and get frustrated talking past one another, as happened here.
Specifically, for many people right now, the pressing reason for "green" energy is climate change. Ergo "green" energy is energy which does not release significant amounts of CO2 when used. Solar panels are "green" energy in that they help solve a chronic environmental problem.
At the same time, as was pointed out, solar panels require some incredibly toxic chemicals to be created, and to the extent they are recyclable, that recycling process also involves, creates, and produces as waste even more horrific chemicals. Therefore solar panels are not "green" energy in that they directly contribute to an acute environmental problem.
The root of the issue is picking some abstract label, "green energy", and then each person argues whether something meets their own personal definition of that abstract label.
A more useful question may be "in which ways are solar panels good for the environment, in which ways are they harmful, and does one obviously outweigh the other?"
A supporter of solar would probably say "solar panels breakeven for co2 in just 3 years, a fraction of their lifespan, so they spend most of their life replacing fossil fuels which is good. While toxic chemicals are a byproduct of their creation, and those toxic chemicals would be harmful if released into the environment, they can be contained, stored, and disposed of in a way that localizes all harm to the point that there is no widespread environmental impact from their manufacture".
That's weird! HN links are usually pretty stable- maybe backend tweaks were made.
At any rate- I think that it's likely far easier to deal with waste that can be put in a barrel and placed somewhere, rather than waste that diffuses into the atmosphere and stays there permanently.
An ideal waste disposal site would probably be a landfill in some unpopulated endorheic basin somewhere, so that there is no risk of contamination of waterways.
One bonus side effect of this is that an influx of batteries meant to be recycled means it will be easier and more profitable for battery recycling to get off the ground.
That means more materials and better future recycling process discoveries
I am not saying this is OK nor acceptable however with a deposit people can pull batteries out of the trash and redeem them like cans and bottles. Just that a battery is worth a lot more.
These things are now everywhere , not just litter but an environmental horror story and a fire risk as well. Previously I had seen them & wondered what they were then this Big Clive video explained all ..
It's been infuriating watching this in real time in the UK. Over the past 6 months, shops that sold liquids overnight just stopped selling anything reusable, with shelves full of this single use shit
Of course these sell better with higher margins than the old liquid bottles. Hope they get taxed into oblivion, wayyy worse for society than an equivalent box of cigarettes
My God, that video made me wince when he revealed the insides of all those devices. Perfectly good lithium and manufacturing, made to be used once and literally thrown away. Such a disgusting level of waste.
How is that cost effective? To me, it seems like something is wrong with our economy if it's cost effective to waste so many resources. I'm sure the cost to an individual to extract and refine those resources are low-- but the cost to society as a whole of littering those resources is great
In many countries, tobacco is very highly taxed (over 10£ for a pack in the UK). Some recent legislation made reusable vaporiser products hard to purchase and sell, limiting tank sizes, nicotine contents, etc, which opened the market for these.
Due to the highly taxed nature of nicotine products, the battery/circuitry cost is negligible if it helps getting around restrictions.
Margins on these are almost certainly insane, and they appeal to young folk. Don't even need to do the math to know why even large retailers like Tesco are replacing their stocks with them
Perhaps it's an unintended consequence of sin taxes on tobacco? If traditional cigarettes were sold at 100-300% of manufacturing cost, single-use electronics couldn't compete.
you have a strong of faith in capitalism if you expect a market solution to these kind of ills, or if you think it's a few incremental reforms away from being back on-track as "correct" capitalism
Lithium batteries are too widely used in my opinion.
I have the IKEA Eneby Bluetooth speaker. Uses 3 AAA. I can just reuse what rechargeable batteries I have. And I can use the speaker as long as I have batteries so I can charge up as many AAAs as I have. The speaker is no larger than most speakers. You can also recharge the batteries inside the speaker if you want.
So many things would be just fine with normal AA or AAA batteries.
There are lithiums in a similar size as AA and company, and are standards that hold more power. Like the 18650 or the 21700. They're perfectly viable as batteries honestly, and they've caused a revolution in stuff like flashlights.
I'm trying not to poo-poo lithiums since they honestly are super good. I'm just upset about this immense level of waste.
I've even seen them ending up in the ocean and harbors. Teens will litter them on the shoreline and not realize (or care) that the high tide will take them.
> So far, I’ve only managed to score a couple, but I know of people who can’t seem to stop finding them. I guess it’s the same people who always seem to find pennies when they are walking around.
I don’t find pennies, but the first lock picks I made I made from street cleaner bristles someone gave me. I’d never seen one before up close, but since that day I’ve been unable to not find them and pick them up, typically one or two a week. Except that day I was working really late and when I looked at the empty parking lot as the sun rose and the ground flashed at me :-)
The same thing happened with four leaf clovers: a friend claimed they are reasonably common and we went out to a lawn and looked. Within a couple of days I’d trained my brain to detect them as I walk around.
I don't recall ever seeing something like this so I wanted to know what they look like. Here's a short video that shows a guy walking around looking for them. He also talks briefly about some uses he has for them.
They are no that great because they rust. Windshield wiper blades are a much better metal. And you can find tons of them just going to an auto store parking lot after a rain.
> I’d never seen one before up close, but since that day I’ve been unable to not find them and pick them up, typically one or two a week.
Same. At a previous HOPE, I'd mentioned to someone in the lockpicking village that I had never been able to find them, despite living in a city with weekly street sweeping. We walked outside and promptly found 10 or so. As you say, after you know what they look like, and where they usually are, you can't help but see them!
Quite a lot of windshield wipers have metal inserts with the same properties & dimensions. Perfect to open your older car when you forgot the keys inside.
I received an old terracotta pot with some succulents a while back that also had some clovers growing in it. One day I noticed a 4-leaf clover, then another, any another all in the same pot. The next day my black cat had eaten them all, but that’s another story. Two years later and the same pot still regularly produces 4-leaf clovers while the other nearby pots only seem to ever produce the normal 3-leaf variety.
In my experience, the ESP32's ADC isn't noisy so much as buggy. When using the most straight forward mode of operation, software triggering, the ADC frequently spits out garbage. It's almost as if it's an internal pin mux problem.
The ADC can instead be clocked by the I2S peripheral, and when doing so it seems to bypass that particular bug. I did that for a hobby project. I was trying to detect 500uS wide pulses, and I went from regularly missing them to getting every single one.
I suspect that the software trigger mode goes through an intermediate MCU in the guts of the ESP32, and there's some race conditions in it's firmware.
Another one was a trend of "single use" phone battery banks. Where its a rechargeable lithium battery but without the recharge circuit so once its flat you just throw it in the bin.
Be extremely careful about damaged batteries, they are a major fire risk indoors. Strongly recommend outdoors disassembly away from structures. Metal ammo boxes are a good idea to store the batteries in as a lot of RC hobbyists know
You can also purchase heavy zippered containers or Velcro-ed pouches made of fire-retardant fabric that are intended for use as safe charging containers for lithium polymer batteries.
I personally wouldn't trust anything less than steel ammo boxes. I've exploded batteries before and they get seriously hot. It will completely burn through anything without a lot of thermal mass. There are videos on youtube showing how cheaper pouches are completely useless
What is a battery fire like in an ammo box? I imagine flames shooting up, catching the ceiling on fire, and the bottom getting so hot that it catches the shelf on fire.
I made a lithium battery pack for amateur radio once. I was scared of it for a while and charged it in my fireplace. If it catches on fire, well, that's the place, right? (They were A123 cells though. Not as firey as other chemistries.)
A damaged battery's trapped energy is very explosive. A decent steel ammo box will contain the blast. It seems likely that a discarded battery found on the street might have been crushed or punctured by a vehicle wheel or similar
https://youtu.be/HCGtRgBUHX8
Definitely. My dad sells ebike batteries and there was recent electrical fire in my parents garage due to one of the "dead" batteries exploding. Beyond just the initial fire from the battery, it also resulted in molten metal shrapnel ricocheting off the ceiling and started other fires simultaneously.
Thankfully we all awake and our garden hose was enough to put it out, but it was pretty clear to us that safe/proper battery storage is needed asap.
There's not really enough Lithium in Li-ion or LiPo batteries to cause issues when putting out fires. The way the fire department here currently deals with electric car fires is to first douse the battery pack with large amounts of water to put out the fire and to then park the car in a container with water to keep the battery submerged as it cools[0]. No explosions as of yet.
This is a good way to limit somehow the environmental damage created by those disgraceful single use vape devices; I wonder how on earth they're allowed to be produced and sold!
Other users warned about recovered batteries: true, give them a good visual inspection first, always check they're not damaged and measure above a certain safe level (usually 3.0V for Li-Ion) before attempting their recharge. Also keep in mind that those small TP4056 boards were set up for recharging bigger cells and output a higher current. With 500mA charging a 550mA cell we're close to C, which is perfectly doable, however it's a stress I wouldn't subject a unknown used cell to. To stay on the safe side, I'd limit the output current to 250mA or less, which is doable by swapping the resistor going from pin 2 of the chip to ground with a 5KOhm or more one.
I built a USB power back using these cells a couple months ago after finding out that disposable vapes have rechargeable batteries. A friend had already taken the cells out of several of his own vapes; I don't know how I'd feel about taking apart ones that I found on the street.
I still have a few Lithium polymer MacBook batteries after replacing them due to swell. I think it is possible to get individual cells from them and use protection circuits like this. The problem of course is that they swelled, there is videos how people puncture outside shell to release gas, but it is a very dangerous and scary thing to do.
I wanted to buy some VTC6 cells (for my RC planes), but there's a big counterfeit problem here, so I did what any one of us would do: I wrote a capacity testing program to graph the battery capacity. It's fairly easy to use, if you want to test your own cells, all you need (TM) is an electronic load and a drone FC (they come with voltage/current sensors and cost $15, plus I had a few lying around).
Here are some pretty graphs of fake and real VTC6es:
I suppose the opposite is true too: you could make a little circuit in volume that could turn junk (or any) batteries into firestarters. Glad nobody seems to have made these IFDs.
Not knowing anything about vape internals and with him referring to them as “lithium” instead of LiPo or LiIon, I thought on first reading that he was recommending recharging primary lithium batteries. Which would already be a kind of stochastic IFD!
Lithium batteries are easier to charge, have a more suitable voltage, are lighter for the same energy and have no memory effect. They also have a great even voltage drop during discharge which makes for accurate charge indicators (Sony used to advertise them as "infolithium" back in the day)
Lithium batteries are pretty great except for the fire risk. And Lithium mining is bad for the environment (lots of chemical waste during extraction) so using them for single use stuff is horrible.
Reminds me of a movie I saw as a kid where a guy from the future comes back to the 80s. There's a scene where he's looking for new batteries for his gadgets.
Woman at the store counter (peering suspiciously at the battery): "What kind did you say they were?"
Traveler: "Plutonium."
My only thought at the time was "My god, what an ecological nightmare that would unleash when people start throwing these things out with the trash!"
I see a lot of these disposable e-cigarettes here in England. Usually discarded around big parks in the centre. I did consider picking them up to reuse before.
I see dozens of these scattered about every time I go walking in my area. Need to order a bunch of those protection/charging boards and start harvesting the free batteries.
They should be illegal- the waste of RECHARGEABLE lithium cells in DISPOSABLE vapes is insane. At least in the UK, anywhere there are teenagers these things follow. I'll admit as an electronics hobbyist these can be a good source of free batteries though (hell, it'd probably be cheaper and certainly quicker for me to walk into a vape shop and shuck these for the batteries than it is to buy them online).
Real evil villain stuff tbh- wasting rare metals, getting kids addicted to nicotine, probably shipped by the boatload from China...
These types of situations make me think some externalities should be priced in, perhaps through taxes. It's ridiculous that these devices make litter of rare metals that also have a risk of fires. If we're gonna allow it, it ought to include the cost of inevitably cleaning them up off the streets
That's literally true but that's inefficient. The question is whether it's more inefficient than whatever you try to do to solve it and the risk it does more harm than good.
By the literal definition of what an "externality" is.
A company cutting costs by dumping their PFAS into the local river isn't being "paid for" by anyone. Except with our health and all the dead insects and fish and compounding environmental effects brought with it
By definition an externality is a "market failure" because the market completely fails to account for this effect. There are "positive externalities" as well, but that's obviously not relevant here
Problem is if we started pricing in this stuff it would absolutely obliterate other, much more wasteful practices. If these were priced in, almost no one could afford to drive SUVs like they do now. Which is a good thing but isn't going to be accepted by the public.
Maybe it’s just the news I’m fed, but I have an unshakeable feeling that China is waging war with “the west”, but they’re doing it discretely, by making everyone a little sicker.
China doesn't have to do anything on purpose. America and American's utter disregard for anything other than saving a couple pennies here and there mean every possible corner will be cut, without any purposeful planning or damaging intent.
Considering what "the west" did to itself in past centuries (and still does) I think China is just participating in a preëxisting tradition of self harm.
They didn't pay for the processing.. We ignore a lot of cost when selling a product, and particularly the cost of recycling, which start to be a huge issue taking in account the amount of waste produced..
Lithium mining isn't particularly bad and it is mostly done in fairly well regulated parts of the world (mainly Australia and Chile) with at least somewhat enforced worker and environmental protections.
It's possible you are thinking of Cobalt which is very bad?
Yeah you're right, cobalt is probably worse, but lithium isn't great either. All unnecessary mining seems pretty horrible to me, even thought these capes might not be as bad as disposable lithium AA s that are probably made in larger qty.
There is a CSS rule: font-feature-settings: "liga", "dlig" [1]. This rule enables both standard (liga) and discretionary ligatures (dlig). The discretionary set often includes a loop "st" ligature [2].
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/font-featur... says “Whenever possible, Web authors should instead use the font-variant shorthand property or an associated longhand property such as font-variant-ligatures, font-variant-caps, font-variant-east-asian, font-variant-alternates, font-variant-numeric or font-variant-position. These lead to more effective, predictable, understandable results than font-feature-settings, which is a low-level feature designed to handle special cases where no other way exists to enable or access an OpenType font feature.”
Safari Mobile allows JavaScript shortcuts to run in any web page: I created a web shortcut in the Apple Shortcuts App to disable ligatures using JavaScript, and run it from the page share icon in Mobile Safari - unobvious functionality! I only learned that feature was available on the iPad today! I would prefer a user style sheet override. . .
Sorry to be snarky, but this whole comment thread borders on satire for me.
If I can think of a "disaster for the human race", it's probably people being paid obscene amounts of money in exchange for advancing the destruction of the environment.
