Hacker News

There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape

2026-01-1217:50758654blog.jgc.org

So, I'm walking through a park when I see this thing lying on the ground: It's a disposable vape that someone has discarded because it's emp...

So, I'm walking through a park when I see this thing lying on the ground:

It's a disposable vape that someone has discarded because it's empty. Specifically, it's a "Fizzy Max III 60K Rechargeable Disposable Vape" and I was about to take it to a bin to throw away when I noticed it had USB-C. I know nothing about vapes so that was a total WTF moment. 

Naturally, I took it home, sanitized it, and plugged it in. Not only did this thing have USB-C and a rechargeable battery, it had a small display showing battery percentage and poison vape fluid percentage. It looks kind of cyberpunk.


I ripped the thing apart and discarded the now empty chambers that had contained the fluid. At the bottom there are two circuit boards and a battery. 

The battery is an 800 mAh lipo.
So, wait? This is a disposable device. After 60,000 sucks on the teat you're meant to throw away a battery, display, microprocessor etc. WTF? Turns out that you're meant to recycle it, but it's crazy large amount of technology for nicotine sucking. 

On one side you've got three pairs of pins that are inserted into the chambers containing the vape fluid and are controlled by three transistors on the other PCB. These pins heat the fluid making the vape's vapour. They are activated by the three microphones seen in this picture.

The vape knows you're sucking on the teat in one of six positions by which combination of microphones sense the sucking. This allows it to heat one or two of the chambers providing six flavour combinations.


Three transistors and a small chip that controls charging of the battery. 

Sadly, despite there being some pretty obvious pads connected to the microprocessor (labelled B0081S1) and the fact that those pads are also connected to the USB-C connecter, I have been unable to talk to it via PyOCD or other tools. I was hoping this was a small ARM device that I might be able to hack.

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Comments

  • By GeertB 2026-01-145:0118 reply

    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!

    • By pjmlp 2026-01-147:573 reply

      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.

      • By pkolaczk 2026-01-148:0914 reply

        > 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.

        • By tialaramex 2026-01-1411:295 reply

          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.

          • By miki123211 2026-01-1419:003 reply

            Not just that, nobody chooses their parking spot based on the UI of the machine.

            Banks and phone manufacturers now care about UI, because some of them started to do so, and people started switching to them en masse. US carriers were bleeding subscribers left and right when the iPhone was only available on AT&T, which was the first time people started switching plans to get a specific phone instead of the other way around.

            People usually choose their parking based on where they want to go and how far it is from that place, and that trumps all other considerations. Paying more for programmers or parking machine processors would be a waste of money.

            • By bdamm 2026-01-1421:491 reply

              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.

              • By boothby 2026-01-1517:551 reply

                I live in vancouver and cannot install such apps on my phone. While you may have found the machine's UI unusual, I use them quite often and I suspect that people like me would invalidate your claim... if it went to court. But parking lots aren't the purview of the courts -- enforcement of private parking happens privately, so your sorrows would likely fall on the hardened ears of a privately owned impound lot operator.

                My partner and I frequently "race" at the parking game and I win at the "slow" machine nearly every time because the apps are so unresponsive and badly designed.

                • By bdamm 2026-01-1522:46

                  It wasn't one of the "Ziply" or "PayByPhone" machines - with which I have no problem, generally. These are much more common.

                  It was "Parkedin" at 745 Thurlow St, underground lot. I haven't encountered it anywhere else. Do me a favour, go park there and see for yourself.

                  Curious that you'd be willing to invalidate my claim without knowing what service it was.

            • By tobyjsullivan 2026-01-1421:09

              > 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.

            • By yushyy 2026-01-1421:58

              [dead]

          • By littlestymaar 2026-01-1413:17

            > 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.

          • By jimmydddd 2026-01-154:14

            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.

          • By ryandrake 2026-01-1416:095 reply

            While this is a decision-making problem, it is also an engineering incompetence problem. No matter what pointy haired boss is yelling about "priorities" ultimately software developers are the ones writing the code, and are responsible for how awful it is.

            When it comes to priorities about what to write and what to focus on, the buck stops at management and leadership. When it comes to the actual quality of the software written, the buck stops at the developer. Blame can be shared.

            • By ASalazarMX 2026-01-1417:42

              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.

            • By freetinker 2026-01-1417:071 reply

              To paraphrase Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to prioritize something when his salary depends upon his not prioritizing it.”

              • By tialaramex 2026-01-1418:02

                Certainly one of the benefits of my "Fuck Off Fund" is that for a good many years now it has enabled me to be unburdened by concerns about whether I might get fired for saying what I think to management.

                I'm at much lower risk than the imagined target of the "Fuck Off Fund" concept for things like inappropriate sexual contact or coercive control, but I find it really does lift a weight off you to know that actually I don't have to figure out whether I can say Fuck Off. The answer to that is always "Yes" which leaves only the question of whether I should say that. Sometimes I do.

                And you know, on zero occasions so far have I been fired as a consequence of telling management to fuck off. But also, I had to think hard about that because, thanks to the fund, I had never worried about it. I've been fired (well, given garden leave, same thing) but I have no reason to think it's connected to telling anybody to fuck off.

            • By miki123211 2026-01-1419:15

              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.

            • By mrguyorama 2026-01-1417:331 reply

              > 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.

              • By ryandrake 2026-01-1418:111 reply

                The idea that workers are not responsible for their own competence or the quality of their work output is such a bizarre take that you really only see on HN. Just because nobody is forcing you to write quality code, doesn't mean you shouldn't. Nobody is forcing you to bathe or brush your teeth, either, so why do we do it?

                • By lazide 2026-01-1418:58

                  Nobody here is writing that code.

            • By lazide 2026-01-1416:42

              You mean the developer hired by (and fired by) management?

        • By csomar 2026-01-148:252 reply

          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.

          • By sofixa 2026-01-1410:037 reply

            > Absolute nightmare.

            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.), and have someone deploy, install, manage, update, etc. all of that.

            • By Ekaros 2026-01-1411:29

              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.

            • By potato3732842 2026-01-1410:531 reply

              >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.

              • By sofixa 2026-01-1413:582 reply

                And when that box fails, you're looking at how long with no access? Longer than any AWS outage.

                • By trinix912 2026-01-1414:552 reply

                  The IT guy walks in and replaces/restarts the box instead of waiting for the gods of AWS to descent to earth and restart theirs. They have direct control vs. waiting for something magic to happen.

                  • By gopher_space 2026-01-1420:04

                    You also have real-time ETAs from an actual human local to the issue. Plenty of domains where your clients won't care if AWS is down for everyone.

                  • By sofixa 2026-01-1415:031 reply

                    The building has an onsite IT guy with enough spares to fix anything that could go wrong with the box?

                    • By trinix912 2026-01-1415:50

                      Have you ever actually seen these systems in person? It's usually a microcontroller which already rules out a ton of stuff you're talking about. Serious places will buy 2-3 of them at the time of installation to have some spares. The ones here are "user-replaceable" as well (unplug these three cables, replace the box, plug them back in). It's not some mysterious bunch-of-wires-on-arduino-pins magic box that nobody dares to touch.

                      The one at my previous office even had centralized management through an RS232 connection to a PC. No internet and related downtime at all. And I don't recall us ever being locked out because of that.

                • By throwway120385 2026-01-1419:00

                  If you buy hardware from HID Global / Assa Abloy the box never breaks.

            • By jon-wood 2026-01-1411:411 reply

              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.

              • By yencabulator 2026-01-1617:19

                Yes, but your average webdev doesn't know how to program that SaaS, so the market is saturated with bad software.

            • By Nextgrid 2026-01-1410:243 reply

              > 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.

              • By onli 2026-01-1410:472 reply

                What updates? That would be on a local network and have no internet connection, if done right.

                • By csomar 2026-01-1412:01

                  I am guessing the main attraction of such a system is that owners can set the cards remotely and get data about it (ie: who accessed and when)

                • By sofixa 2026-01-1412:00

                  And? That doesn't mean, especially for a system with security impact (like door access), that it should never be updated.

              • By lazide 2026-01-1410:481 reply

                Those devices can be trivially power cycled, and won’t have as many issues with dodgy power. Some PC somewhere with storage is a bigger problem.

                • By Nextgrid 2026-01-1411:441 reply

                  > Some PC somewhere with storage is a bigger problem

                  Both an embedded microcontroller and a PC have storage. The reason you can power-cycle a microcontroller at will is because that storage is read-only and only a specific portion dedicated to state is writable (and the device can be reset if that ever gets corrupted).

                  Use a buildroot/yocto image on the PC with read-only partitions and a separate state partition that the system can rebuild on boot if it gets corrupted and you'll have something that can be power-cycled with no issues. Network hardware is internally often Linux-based and manages to do fine for exactly this reason.

                  • By lazide 2026-01-1412:232 reply

                    PCs are orders of magnitude more complex, with a lot more to break. Sounds like a whole lot of work for… what?

                    Assuming the internet connection and AWS work of course. Which they won’t always, then oops.

                    • By bluGill 2026-01-1414:22

                      A large number of embedded micro controllers are just PCs running Yocto linux configured as GP said. You can save money with a $.05 micro controller, but in most cases the development costs to make that entire system work are more than just buying an off the shelf raspberry pi.

                    • By Nextgrid 2026-01-1412:311 reply

                      If you're relying on AWS you either way have a "PC" to relay communication between AWS and the keycard readers & door latches.

                      • By lazide 2026-01-1413:33

                        There are IoT libraries that don’t require that.

              • By Telemakhos 2026-01-1410:572 reply

                You know what else would suffice plenty? Physical keys and mechanical locks. They worked (and still work) without electricity. The tech is mature and well-understood.

                • By Nextgrid 2026-01-1411:45

                  The reason for moving away from physical keys is that key management becomes a nightmare; you can't "revoke" a key without changing all the locks which is an expensive operation and requires distributing new keys to everyone else. Electronic access control solves that.

                • By hoistbypetard 2026-01-1413:57

                  You might find Matt Blaze's paper on vulnerabilities in master-keyed physical locks interesting:

                  https://eprint.iacr.org/2002/160.pdf

            • By unethical_ban 2026-01-1414:55

              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!

            • By quickthrowman 2026-01-1412:371 reply

              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.

              • By sofixa 2026-01-1413:526 reply

                The server running that system needs cooling, yes. You can't just shove it in a closet with zero thought and expect it to not overheat/shut down/catch fire, unless you live in the Arctic.

                • By quickthrowman 2026-01-1414:33

                  There are card access systems that don’t require a computer, just a microcontroller. Perhaps if you need to integrate with multiple sites or a backend system for access control rules you can add computers, but card access systems are dead ass simple for a reason; they need to be reliable. The good systems that have computers still allow access in the event of a network failure.

                  Any access control system that fails in the event that it loses internet connectivity is poorly designed.

                • By mrguyorama 2026-01-1417:49

                  >You can't just shove it in a closet with zero thought and expect it to not overheat/shut down/catch fire

                  Actually in almost all products meant for real companies doing real work, this is an explicit design requirement.

                  Every cash register runs off of a computer that sits in a tiny metal oven with no cooling and is expected to run 24/7 without fail.

                  The difference between a tech gadget and a real world, real purpose appliance.

                • By anthk 2026-01-1415:10

                  You must be young. We used to have handhelds and computers with no cooling at all.

                • By dgacmu 2026-01-1414:251 reply

                  I have a little fanless mini PC that runs various stuff around my house, including homeassistant. The case is basically a big heat sink.

                  It started crashing during backups.

                  The solution was to stick a fan on it. :( This is literally a box _designed to not need a fan_. And yet. It now has a fan and has been stable for months. And it's not even in a closet - it's wall-mounted with lots of available air around it.

                  • By TeMPOraL 2026-01-1418:261 reply

                    I'm guessing it's the HDD that's failing. Had such mysterious failures with my NVR (the Cloud Key thingie) from UniFi. Turns out, HDDs don't like operating in 60+ degree Celsius heat all the time - but SSDs don't mind, so fortunately the fix was just to swap the drive for a solid state one.

                    • By dgacmu 2026-01-1419:58

                      I think it was the DRAM on mine, oddly. It already uses an nvme ssd. Could have been the CPU, of course - the error was manifesting as memory corruption but that could well have been happening during read or write.

                • By ssl-3 2026-01-1416:36

                  That is, in fact, exactly what we typically see in reality with local access control system head-ends.

                  At the doors, there might be keycards, biometrics and PINs (oh my!) happening.

                  But there's usually just not much going on, centrally. It doesn't take much to keep track of an index of IDs and the classes of things those IDs are allowed to access.

                • By trinix912 2026-01-1415:01

                  You're saying that as if we never had Z80-based microcontrollers doing all this without problems. Complete with centralized control and all.

            • By csomar 2026-01-1410:571 reply

              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.

              • By HWR_14 2026-01-1411:07

                In the US, the answer is that exit would have to work in the event that AWS is down or power is out. Some exceptions exist for special cases.

          • By exikyut 2026-01-148:334 reply

            I wonder what happened to the building when us-east-1 went down.

            • By Someone 2026-01-1412:40

              As the parent said: “Everyone was locked out in a building am staying at (40 something stories) for several hours.”

            • By Ekaros 2026-01-1410:462 reply

              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.

            • By csomar 2026-01-149:06

              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.

            • By blitzar 2026-01-1411:282 reply

              I wonder what happened to the building when the internet went down. How do you get into the room to reboot the router?

              • By stephen_g 2026-01-1413:38

                There’s usually a back door with a physical key. The problem can be getting ahold of one of the people with that key though!

              • By mystifyingpoi 2026-01-1412:362 reply

                There is probably a break-glass procedure for such cases, like, break the literal window.

                • By bluGill 2026-01-1414:19

                  A lot of modern glass is hard to break. In many cases this is a safety feature (if you can't break the glass you can't get shoved out the window in a fight...)

                • By blitzar 2026-01-1413:031 reply

                  Is that why there is a brick next to the procedure manual?

                  • By lazide 2026-01-1416:45

                    That’s the emergency escape brick.

        • By lallysingh 2026-01-1411:363 reply

          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.

          • By scrumper 2026-01-1413:481 reply

            I was late for a train at my local station and the parking machine was taking ages to respond to keypresses. I could see the training pulling up to the platform and I was still stuck entering the second digit of seven. In my shameful frustration I hit the machine fairly hard. While the button presses might take a while to register, the anti-tamper alarm has really low latency and is also quite loud.

            • By bluGill 2026-01-1414:171 reply

              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).

              • By scrumper 2026-01-1513:56

                Well it was six years ago, I work from home now and take the train once a quarter, and they've augmented the machines with app parking now so I have nothing to complain about anymore :)

          • By ssl-3 2026-01-1416:181 reply

            Debouncing would be smart, sure. But sometimes, these sorts of embedded machines are weirder than that.

            At Kroger-brand gas stations near me, I get to interact with the buttons on gas pumps to select options and enter a loyalty ID.

            Those buttons have visible feedback on a screen, and also audible feedback consisting of a loud beep. And there's always delays between button press and feedback.

            Some combination of debounce and wear might explain that easily enough.

            Except... the delay between pushing a button and getting feedback is variable by seemingly-random amounts. The delay also consistently increases if a person on the other side of the pump island is also pushing buttons to do their own thing.

            It's maddening. Push button, wait indeterminate time for beep, and repeat for something like 12 or 13 button presses -- and wait longer if someone else is also using the machine.

            I can't rationally explain any of that variability with debounce.

            • By lazide 2026-01-1416:431 reply

              They are running it on a Java VM in a container - on a 386?

              Over WiFi?

              • By ssl-3 2026-01-1417:351 reply

                Perhaps.

                Or perhaps the original programmers skipped the class on concurrency 25 years ago, and nobody has subsequently bothered to pay anyone to update that part of the software.

                • By QuercusMax 2026-01-1417:59

                  One time I decided to test whether these grocery story loyalty card XX cents off per gallon transactions were properly isolated, when my wife and I were both filling up vehicles at the same gas station at the same time. We both got the $0.50 discount per gallon with no problem. I'm sure there are lots of creative ways you can exploit the poor design of these things.

          • By philipallstar 2026-01-1412:451 reply

            That's a good point. When I use them I assume they're making API calls to a central server to validate (or something) them.

            • By Schlagbohrer 2026-01-1413:161 reply

              Making API calls to a server to do button debouncing does sound like something so stupid a tech company would do it

              • By bigfishrunning 2026-01-1413:56

                in the worst case, they don't know they're doing it, because they've called some 'debounce.js' microservice wrapper and haven't audited it

        • By smokel 2026-01-149:36

          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.

        • By jwr 2026-01-149:333 reply

          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.

          • By ttoinou 2026-01-1410:522 reply

            It could be a management problem instead also, while developers are just following instructions sent by management

            • By Nextgrid 2026-01-1411:47

              And nobody with options would settle for the low pay and terrible working conditions, so the quality of the output also reflects that.

            • By jwr 2026-01-1418:181 reply

              I disagree — developers are not sheep.

              • By ttoinou 2026-01-159:00

                I agree ! But they could be stuck because of management

          • By graemep 2026-01-1411:251 reply

            They also prefer you to use the mobile app so they can gather more data so they do not want the devices to work well in the first place.

            • By s1mplicissimus 2026-01-1413:481 reply

              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

              • By throwway120385 2026-01-1418:57

                I work in an adjacent industry, and trust me when I say that a lot of older equipment companies just did not care much about the experience of using the equipment. It's much more important to tick all of the boxes in the back end accounting system than to have a high quality experience on the kiosk.

          • By cmrdporcupine 2026-01-1419:59

            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.

        • By contravariant 2026-01-1410:191 reply

          Give it some slack, it's probably doing its best to inexplicably run windows.

          • By mrguyorama 2026-01-1417:38

            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.

        • By stavros 2026-01-148:241 reply

          Or maybe they think they should be sending each keystroke to a server and waiting for the response.

          • By amelius 2026-01-149:234 reply

            A server on Mars?

            • By JoelMcCracken 2026-01-1413:251 reply

              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

              • By labcomputer 2026-01-1419:49

                No, not a mystery, in fact.

                Each keypress is appended to an 80 line prompt (key name along with timestamp of keypress and current text shown on the screen) and fed to a frontier LLM. Some of the office staff banged on the keypad for a few hours to generate training data to fine-tune the LLM on the task of denouncing key presses.

                Thanks to some optimizations with Triton and running multi-GPU instances, latency is down to just a few seconds per digit entered.

                You see, we needed to hit our genAI onboarding KPIs this quarter…

            • By trinix912 2026-01-1414:50

              Probably a Celeron-powered PC tower barely keeping up with Windows Server 2008 R2 in a closet of a public office ;)

            • By stavros 2026-01-149:24

              Gotta have multiple AZs.

            • By me551ah 2026-01-149:301 reply

              The server is probably running Python

              • By bigfishrunning 2026-01-1413:57

                lol it's the flask debug server, "don't use this in production" banner and all

        • By ZiiS 2026-01-1411:31

          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.

        • By fennecfoxy 2026-01-1411:223 reply

          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.

          • By Nextgrid 2026-01-1411:50

            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.

          • By jon-wood 2026-01-1411:372 reply

            The self service kiosks are intentionally throttled when scanning barcodes, at a guess to prevent people accidentally scanning the previous/wrong item - I once had some problems with one and a staff member flipped it into supervisor mode at which point they were able to scan at the same rate you'd see at a manned checkout.

            • By Nextgrid 2026-01-1411:511 reply

              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.

              • By TeMPOraL 2026-01-1418:30

                Now take that, and add someone in our Polish supermarket chain (Biedronka) having the dumb "insight" to disable "scan multiple" option. Until ~month ago, whenever buying something in larger quantity, I could just press "Scan multiple", tap in the amount, scan the barcode once, and move all the items of the same type to the "already scanned" zone. Now, I have to do it one by one, each time waiting for the scales to settle. Infuriating when you're buying some spice bag or candy and have to scan 12 of them one by one.

            • By fennecfoxy 2026-01-1412:04

              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.

          • By theragra 2026-01-157:49

            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.

        • By itsamario 2026-01-1418:12

          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.

        • By afpx 2026-01-1417:321 reply

          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?

          • By mordechai9000 2026-01-1417:49

            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?

        • By HWR_14 2026-01-1411:03

          It could also be intentional UX design. Or a result of the keyboard hardware.

        • By pjmlp 2026-01-148:172 reply

          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

          • By anthk 2026-01-148:381 reply

            - TCL/Tk slowish under P3 times, decent enough under P4 with SSE2. AMSN wasn't that bad back in the day, and with 8.6 the occasional UI locks went away.

            - Visual Basic. Yes, it was interpreter, and you used to like it. GUI ran fast, good for small games and management software. The rest... oh, they tried to create a C64 emulator under VB, it ran many times slower than one created in C. Nowadays, with a P4 with SSE2 and up you could emulate it at decent speeds with TCL/Tk 8.6 since they got some optimized interpreter. IDK about VB6, probably the same case. But at least we know TCL/Tk got improved on multiprocessing and the like. VB6 was stuck in time.

            - TCL can call C code with ease, since the early 90's. Not the case with Electron. And JS really sucks with no standard library. With Electron, the UI can be very taxing, even if they bundle FFMPEG and the like. Tk UI can run on a toaster.

            - Yeah, there is C#... but it isn't as snappy and portable TCL/Tk with IronTCL, where it even targets Windows XP. You have JimTCL where it can run on scraps. No Tk, but the language it's close in syntax to TCL, it has networking and TLS support and OFC has damn easy C interops. And if you are a competent programmer, you can see it has some alpha SDL2 bindings. Extend those and you can write a dumb UI with Nuklear or similar in days. Speed? It won't win against other languages on number crunching, but for sure it could be put to drive some machines.

            • By pjmlp 2026-01-149:42

              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.

          • By eru 2026-01-148:253 reply

            Interpreters don't have to be slow.

            Forth is usually interpreted and pretty fast. And, of course, we have very fast Javascript engines these days. Python speed is being worked on, but it's pretty slow, true.

            • By upofadown 2026-01-1413:03

              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.

            • By anthk 2026-01-148:34

              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).

            • By ErroneousBosh 2026-01-149:37

              It's not really "interpreted", in the way that for example BASIC or Java is.

              It's a list of jumps to functions.

        • By megablast 2026-01-1412:42

          Anything that makes the world worse for car drivers is a huge bonus for The planet.

      • By conradev 2026-01-1423:14

        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?

      • By linkregister 2026-01-1417:281 reply

        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.

        • By pluralmonad 2026-01-154:401 reply

          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.

          • By linkregister 2026-01-1518:42

            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.

    • By uxhacker 2026-01-145:213 reply

      The idea that people are smoking arm chips makes me laugh.

    • By stonemetal12 2026-01-1415:59

      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.

    • By torginus 2026-01-148:272 reply

      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).

      • By londons_explore 2026-01-1410:432 reply

        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

        • By Aurornis 2026-01-1415:092 reply

          > 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.

          • By londons_explore 2026-01-1415:312 reply

            But you need very very little digital logic... The same kind of quantity to do the little power indicator LED's on a battery bank (which are charlieplexed btw), and thats done in the same ASIC that also has the 5V boost power supply (multi-amp gnd isolated n type mosfet) and charge circuitry involving voltage references and laser tuned comparators, and sometimes negotiates USB-C PD as well (needs an internal ROM). And the whole thing needs to be really cheap and with a standby current of uA's.

            As long as you aren't interested in multi-Mhz operation, combining the rest at very low cost isn't too tricky.

            • By ssl-3 2026-01-1416:44

              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

            • By Aurornis 2026-01-1417:06

              > 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.

          • By cruffle_duffle 2026-01-1415:362 reply

            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!

            I mean relatively it absolutely is high power. The quiescent current on that thing has to be microamps…

            It’s just funny because to me “high power” is hundreds or thousands of watts. Like an incandescent light bulb or a hair dryer. Or at least it was until I started tinkering with battery powered microcontrollers and doing math to realize exactly how long an 18650 might power a small strip of individually addressable LED’s…

            “High power” is a very relative term :-)

            • By Aurornis 2026-01-1417:05

              > 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.

            • By londons_explore 2026-01-1416:12

              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.

        • By estimator7292 2026-01-1523:06

          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.

      • By joezydeco 2026-01-1413:421 reply

        The vape is disposable, no need for a charging circuit and maybe a simple ADC to determine battery life based on a discharge curve.

        • By bigfishrunning 2026-01-1413:591 reply

          Apparently there is a charging circuit, because the battery will run out long before the fluid does

          • By tstrimple 2026-01-1416:071 reply

            This is the brand I usually use. https://www.off-stamp.com

            It has a separate magnetically attached battery / charging unit. I have to charge 5-6 times per "tank" that's attached. The battery side also has a mini-led display showing animations and battery / juice left so it's actually communicating with the tank side. A kit with battery and tank runs me about $25, but the tank alone is about $20. So they add $5 to cover the battery / charging component. It's a vice, but at least with this brand I'm not throwing away batteries weekly.

            • By robotnikman 2026-01-1419:03

              I always felt those Off-Stamps were at least a bit better than other disposables since the battery portion was at least reusable.

    • By ninalanyon 2026-01-147:501 reply

      How close are we to smart dust I wonder? How small can we make wireless communications?

      • By kvdveer 2026-01-148:193 reply

        > 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.

        • By cruffle_duffle 2026-01-1415:491 reply

          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

          • By TeMPOraL 2026-01-1420:51

            > 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.

        • By slow_typist 2026-01-149:191 reply

          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.

          • By regularfry 2026-01-1410:212 reply

            It needs to be in the infrared spectrum at least to be useful for smart dust, otherwise the package size is still dominated by the size of the antenna. Even mm-wave radar is marginal here.

            • By volemo 2026-01-1411:51

              So... smart dust powered by the sun? Cool!

            • By slow_typist 2026-01-1412:48

              Okay if you take dust literally. The important part is that the particles fly. Like dandelion seeds.

        • By DANmode 2026-01-1417:23

          > 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.

    • By rwmj 2026-01-1412:31

      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!

    • By estimator7292 2026-01-1418:05

      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.

    • By tombert 2026-01-145:534 reply

      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.

      • By rob74 2026-01-146:275 reply

        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...

        • By csomar 2026-01-148:282 reply

          > 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.

          • By kotaKat 2026-01-1411:23

            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.

          • By TeMPOraL 2026-01-1420:40

            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.

        • By adrianN 2026-01-146:383 reply

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

          • By rjh29 2026-01-146:503 reply

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

            • By adrianN 2026-01-149:192 reply

              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).

              • By Fargren 2026-01-1411:592 reply

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

                • By adrianN 2026-01-1416:272 reply

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

                  • By Fargren 2026-01-1419:281 reply

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

                    • By adrianN 2026-01-153:11

                      I would say reusing a "disposable" vape would be refilling it and recharging or exchanging the battery, not salvaging it for parts.

                  • By shibapuppie 2026-01-1420:141 reply

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

                    • By adrianN 2026-01-153:12

                      That there is no way to recycle electronics economically is the reason that they are not recycled. I don't claim otherwise.

                • By sejje 2026-01-1413:091 reply

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

                  • By Fargren 2026-01-1413:52

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

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

              • By 1234letshaveatw 2026-01-1417:121 reply

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

                • By roadside_picnic 2026-01-1418:151 reply

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

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

            • By roadside_picnic 2026-01-1418:05

              > "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.

            • By vasco 2026-01-147:103 reply

              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.

              • By eru 2026-01-148:29

                Well, it depends a lot on material.

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

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

              • By chpatrick 2026-01-148:541 reply

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

                • By mikkupikku 2026-01-1414:38

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

              • By nandomrumber 2026-01-147:541 reply

                > because it gets burned

                I wouldn’t really call that recycling.

                • By johannes1234321 2026-01-1411:54

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

                  But yes, not proper recycling.

          • By setopt 2026-01-149:40

            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).

          • By stmL 2026-01-146:441 reply

            Can you elaborate on that?

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

            • By mngnt 2026-01-146:592 reply

              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

              • By sofixa 2026-01-1410:04

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

              • By pbhjpbhj 2026-01-148:451 reply

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

                • By DaSHacka 2026-01-1410:043 reply

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

                  • By GuinansEyebrows 2026-01-1416:221 reply

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

                    • By DaSHacka 2026-01-1714:16

                      The company, sure, but selecting a fall guy to deal with arbitrary expenses will not help get anything done for the environment.

                  • By pbhjpbhj 2026-01-1417:23

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

                  • By Dylan16807 2026-01-1412:341 reply

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

                    • By tstrimple 2026-01-1416:15

                      See "core charges" for many automotive parts to incentivize the return of waste for refurbishing at the higher end and bottle deposits for cans/bottles at the lower end. It's weird how things so common in one part of our society can seem so foreign in others.

        • By eru 2026-01-148:282 reply

          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.)

          • By pbhjpbhj 2026-01-148:392 reply

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

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

            Do you need it spelling out more clearly?

            • By eru 2026-01-149:061 reply

              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.

              • By slow_typist 2026-01-149:261 reply

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

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

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

                • By eru 2026-01-1411:431 reply

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

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

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

                  • By M95D 2026-01-1412:551 reply

                    Did you ever try to burn plastic?

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

                    2) Burning plastic generates toxic fumes.

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

            • By spacebanana7 2026-01-1412:072 reply

              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.

              • By tzs 2026-01-1418:111 reply

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

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

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

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

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

                • By eru 2026-01-162:02

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

                  We are very far from that.

              • By pbhjpbhj 2026-01-1417:33

                >effectively infinite resources

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

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

                A little Malthusian.

          • By volemo 2026-01-1411:561 reply

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

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

            • By vel0city 2026-01-1416:02

              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.

        • By amelius 2026-01-149:26

          Let's start by pricing in the negative externalities.

        • By pixl97 2026-01-1418:36

          >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.

      • By smj-edison 2026-01-146:302 reply

        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.

      • By roadside_picnic 2026-01-1418:01

        > 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!

      • By Mikhail_K 2026-01-149:491 reply

        > It’s beautiful, I love it.

        When computers become disposable, their programmers soon become disposable as well. Maybe, you shouldn't love it.

        • By Dylan16807 2026-01-1412:371 reply

          That doesn't make sense.

          • By sejje 2026-01-1413:13

            Life lessons from anime and the WordPorn meme account.

    • By PurpleRamen 2026-01-1410:19

      > 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.

    • By eru 2026-01-148:22

      > [...] 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.

    • By bartread 2026-01-1414:32

      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.

    • By rm30 2026-01-1413:34

      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.

    • By zoobab 2026-01-1412:49

      "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"

    • By efields 2026-01-1416:29

      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.

    • By wingtw 2026-01-1411:381 reply

      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.. :)

    • By heavenlyblue 2026-01-157:00

      It's a god damn vape, 3Kb of ram is already a massive overkill for the purpose.

    • By SuperMouse 2026-01-145:551 reply

      I've bought hundreds of Puya's for my lab stock on LCSC. Neat little things!

      • By torginus 2026-01-148:401 reply

        How usable are they for hacking? I've had bad experiences with more obscure chips requiring custom programmers/debuggers.

        • By dvdkon 2026-01-1412:24

          They're great, because you can use all standard ARM tooling, including CMSIS-DAP dongles for debugging.

    • By jijijijij 2026-01-1413:35

      > 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.

  • By smashed 2026-01-143:4113 reply

    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.

    • By jaggederest 2026-01-143:4712 reply

      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.

      • By teiferer 2026-01-146:212 reply

        "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.

        • By locknitpicker 2026-01-146:581 reply

          > 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?

          • By pixl97 2026-01-1418:45

            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.

        • By bigstrat2003 2026-01-146:438 reply

          > 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.

          • By repeekad 2026-01-147:471 reply

            Most paper straws use PFAS, meaning we’re actively composting PFAS in a fantasy effort to feel good about our waste without actually giving anything up

            https://fortune.com/well/2023/08/24/paper-straws-harmful-for...

            • By qmr 2026-01-149:43

              Thanks just the dystopian news I needed today.

              What a stupid joke.

          • By piyushpr134 2026-01-147:275 reply

            paper straws do not make any sense any way you look at it. Are we saying that we are okay to cut trees to make straws when we could make them out of petroleum ?

            Moreover, paper straws are not even recyclable due to water content which makes them soggy. Plastic ones are almost 100% recyclable

            Most importantly, unlike plastic straws, they are laced with glue and other chemicals which gets ingested.

            • By teiferer 2026-01-148:522 reply

              > 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.

              • By Saline9515 2026-01-1410:382 reply

                It's not a myth, you can make new items using recycled plastics. Of course, the recycled plastic doesn't have the same properties, but it doesn't mean that it can't be useful to reduce plastic production. Most plastic items do not require pristine materials anyway.

                It's the same for paper and cardboard, and it's much better to reuse it as much as possible to avoid cutting a tree. Letting it rot releases the same amount of CO2 than burning it, by the way.

                https://plasticsrecycling.org/how-recycling-works/the-plasti...

                • By OkayPhysicist 2026-01-1417:101 reply

                  The vast majority of paper products made from farmed trees (because if you're pulping it anyway you can use really fast growing wood), meaning the CO2 you release from burning/composting paper straws is offset by the next tree planted to replace it.

                  Excess CO2 in the atmosphere is driven by burning fuels that aren't being actively produced via recaptured atmospheric CO2, such as petroleum.

                  And the fundamental issue with recycling plastic is that the raw ingredients for virgin plastic are basically free as a byproduct of fuel petroleum extraction. If I want octane, hexane, methane, propane, etc. for fuel, I'm also going to be pulling up and separating out ethane, which is a very quick steam crack and catalyzed polymerization away from polyethylene.

                  • By Saline9515 2026-01-178:53

                    Tree farming has a major environmental impact and degrades natural environments, wildlife and soils. A tree farm is not a forest at all.

                    Some products such as cotton are even more destructive, which is why the cotton tote bag is an environmental absurdity and the plastic equivalent is much better.

                • By volemo 2026-01-1412:041 reply

                  I'd argue it's kinda a myth, because I used to believe we could create a perfectly closed loop (you know, like the one the recycling symbol suggests) if only we could cleanly separate the materials (which in my imagination requires consumers to vigilantly separate the waste into dozens of different bins). I'm beginning to think I was wrong.

                  • By Saline9515 2026-01-1413:552 reply

                    If 1kg of "recycled" plastics allow to reduce the production of 1kg of pristine plastics, it's already a big win, even if it's downcycling. No need to throw away the baby with the bathwater.

                    • By merelythere 2026-01-1418:56

                      It is probably the only argument in favor of recycling. After the last six months exploring the recycling process what I get is this:

                      Reduce, reuse, recycle.

                      The order matter, recycling is useful but should be the last step when something has to be trashed away. In the case of our straws, buying a metal one would reduce and reuse much better than the two others solutions.

                      A problem is that we tend to only talk about recycling while forgetting the two others. It is easy to talk about how many tons has been recycled while it's very difficult to quantify the reduce reuse practice and not very appealing for sellers either.

                    • By smeeagain2 2026-01-1418:21

                      [dead]

              • By Findecanor 2026-01-1514:52

                Plastic does not have to be 100% recyclable for it to be economically viable. However, plastic straws are so small that I'd think most of them get tossed anyway.

            • By minitech 2026-01-147:551 reply

              > 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.

            • By vladvasiliu 2026-01-149:252 reply

              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.

              • By sofixa 2026-01-1410:081 reply

                > 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

                Yeah, if you're using that many, the solution is, and always has been, to get a proper reusable cup (ceramic, glass, whatever).

                • By vladvasiliu 2026-01-1410:11

                  Right, but this just shows why these policies don't work in practice. People will just use 10 paper cups which are free, rather than cart around a big ceramic one.

                  Especially in situations where people don't even have an assigned spot in the office anymore, it's not exactly shocking that many will choose the easier route.

              • By bluGill 2026-01-1414:371 reply

                My company told everyone to bring their own mug, which they were expected to wash from time to time. Then they give mugs for "thanks for working here" awards once in a while so they can be sure everyone has one. Soap and a sink are provided near the coffee makers.

                Paper cups are still provided, but it is intended visitors not people who work in the building.

                • By vladvasiliu 2026-01-1421:24

                  But do people actually use them? That's the theory where I work, too, but most people just use paper cups.

            • By vanviegen 2026-01-147:521 reply

              > 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.

              • By bluGill 2026-01-1414:381 reply

                Natural and biodegradable doesn't mean safe of human ingestion.

                • By vanviegen 2026-01-1419:571 reply

                  And made from petroleum with many interesting additives does mean safe for human ingestion I suppose?

                  • By bluGill 2026-01-1420:27

                    Maybe. Safe of ingestion means we have to know what happens in the body. Some plastics just pass right through and are safe; some biodegradable things are good food for the body. Some biodegradable things degrade to something harmful, and some plastics do get absored into the body and are harmful.

            • By injidup 2026-01-147:342 reply

              Soggy is not a problem.Recycling paper involves wetting it to loose the fibres and then reforming it. It's how paper is made.

              • By bluescrn 2026-01-147:58

                > Soggy is not a problem.

                It is when you're trying to suck a thick milkshake through one, though...

              • By ulrikrasmussen 2026-01-147:421 reply

                But usually paper and cardboard that has been in contact with food is not recyclable because it contaminates the batch. That's why pizza boxes also cannot go into the cardboard/paper fraction.

                • By vanviegen 2026-01-147:541 reply

                  No, that's because pizza boxes are contaminated with fat. That messes up the paper recycling process. Water is fine.

                  • By GCUMstlyHarmls 2026-01-148:121 reply

                    Man, if that's the problem then I can only assume any fast food box is not recyclable too?

                    • By teiferer 2026-01-148:54

                      The point of paper fast food boxes is not to recycle them but to have no trash in the end as they just burn or rot, all in a sustainable way. In contrast to plastic.

          • By woadwarrior01 2026-01-1412:251 reply

            > Nobody makes fun of LED light bulbs because (up front cost aside) they are wildly superior to incandescent.

            There's burgeoning movement called "PWM sensitive"[1] that's opposed to (cheap) LED lights.

            [1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/PWM_Sensitive/

            • By Liftyee 2026-01-1413:001 reply

              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)

              • By evandrofisico 2026-01-1414:24

                yep, i had one led stripe with a controller with a flickering that was kinda invisible to the eye, but very noticeable on camera.

          • By jquery 2026-01-147:143 reply

            I'm convinced paper straws are a psy-op by the plastics industry to make us hate environmentalists.

            • By Am4TIfIsER0ppos 2026-01-1412:11

              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.

            • By hexbin010 2026-01-1410:00

              Or 4D chess by the environmentalists so we go without straws entirely

              Classic replacement of something good with something terrible so customers opt out

          • By philipwhiuk 2026-01-1411:111 reply

            > Nobody makes fun of LED light bulbs because (up front cost aside) they are wildly superior to incandescent

            There was huge resistance to wiping out the inefficient bulbs in the UK. Many many people stockpiled them.

            • By HWR_14 2026-01-1411:17

              At switching time, the affordable option was compact fluorescents. Which did suck.

          • By triceratops 2026-01-1414:463 reply

            I don't understand the moaning and bellyaching about straws. Are people that bad at drinking from cups? If you aren't a toddler or bed-ridden patient in a hospital (EDIT: or anyone else with physical conditions that necessitate a straw) you should be able to drink without a straw.

            • By remove-resolve 2026-01-1415:161 reply

              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.

              • By triceratops 2026-01-1416:24

                I thought "bed-ridden patient" covered everyone who is physically unable to drink without straws due to disabilities or other conditions. I guess that wasn't clear enough though. My apologies. I've edited my comment now.

                > 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

                You have to admit it's been turned into a culture war point by people who mostly don't need straws. They just need boogeymen to rile up people against environmentalism in general.

            • By simgt 2026-01-1423:24

              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.

            • By pixl97 2026-01-1418:381 reply

              >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?

          • By simgt 2026-01-1411:261 reply

            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.

      • By hammock 2026-01-144:573 reply

        > 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.

        • By tomcam 2026-01-145:093 reply

          It was amazing being a kid back then because you could earn some decent coin returning bottles

          • By teiferer 2026-01-146:251 reply

            Nowadays the homeless or other less-than-living-wage earners do that for us. You can see them everywhere in cities all over north america and europe if you pay attention.

            • By pjmlp 2026-01-148:071 reply

              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.

              • By systemtest 2026-01-1416:101 reply

                I kinda prefer cultures where benefits and pensions are enough so that people don't have to dig into trashcans for Pfand.

                • By pjmlp 2026-01-1420:40

                  It is getting hard across many countries.

          • By foolfoolz 2026-01-145:501 reply

            there are still people today who roam neighborhoods collecting bottles and cans

            • By tombert 2026-01-146:00

              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.

        • By pixl97 2026-01-1418:54

          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.

        • By venturecruelty 2026-01-145:111 reply

          Listen, we can hold Big Plastic accountable and also not throw trash out of our cars, I think.

          • By lostlogin 2026-01-145:26

            What’s something we have managed to do this with?

            Maybe the process could be emulated.

      • By throw101010 2026-01-145:003 reply

        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...

        • By consp 2026-01-148:031 reply

          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.

          • By ricardobeat 2026-01-149:07

            Every trash collection site (afvalpunt) has a container for electronics too, that’s where the smaller stuff should go.

        • By Domenic_S 2026-01-145:272 reply

          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...

          • By Espressosaurus 2026-01-1416:42

            Probably originated for disposal of CRTs, due to all that leaded glass.

          • By array_key_first 2026-01-146:16

            Big tobacco strikes again!

        • By GuB-42 2026-01-1410:53

          > 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.

      • By pyrolistical 2026-01-144:324 reply

        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.

        • By kube-system 2026-01-146:03

          > 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

        • By nottorp 2026-01-147:261 reply

          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.

          • By ajb 2026-01-148:212 reply

            The EU and UK already require sellers to recycle electronics, and we can still afford washing machines. Here is Amazon's page:

            https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeI...

            • By nottorp 2026-01-149:041 reply

              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.

              • By WesolyKubeczek 2026-01-149:491 reply

                > for some reason my washers break but the freezer doesn't.

                The properties of your running water and the presence of very much moving parts in the former?

                • By nottorp 2026-01-1415:36

                  Noo it can't be that! I definitely don't have to rebalance the washer regularly to stop it from dancing around my bathroom!

                  It's one of them new solid state washers designed by "AI". Very advanced technology!

            • By whywhywhywhy 2026-01-1412:262 reply

              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.

              • By ajb 2026-01-1415:371 reply

                A washing machine has a decent amount of metal in it, that's definitely going to be recycled, as it has value. A policy like this could cause environmental damage, but saying that it's inevitable is just defeatist. In fact the manufacturer is the one with the knowledge to recycle stuff properly as they know what went into it. This is actually a way to work with the market. Any other option, other than just giving up, involves more government intervention.

                • By jaggederest 2026-01-1416:47

                  There's also Stewart Brand style cradle-to-cradle design, where you build in features that allow recycling to be easy, that's really my goal when I say manufacturers should be responsible - change the design

              • By vel0city 2026-01-1416:26

                The scrap metal yard near me definitely pays to take washing machines and dryers. There's a lot of steel scrap, some circuit boards, and a motor in there.

        • By irishcoffee 2026-01-144:571 reply

          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.

          • By teiferer 2026-01-146:351 reply

            So maybe if you make the cost high enough (which is currently just externalized) then they might start disappearing by not being produced in the first place by lack of demand.

            People don't buy this because it's crap. They buy it because it's cheap.

            • By irishcoffee 2026-01-1416:521 reply

              > 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?

              • By pyrolistical 2026-01-1419:14

                1. Plastic is cheap

                2. Importers of cheap plastic crap are not on the hook of the eventual disposal. So the cost isn’t seen by the consumer at point of purchase but instead indirectly seen in increased taxes for garbage disposal

        • By lend000 2026-01-144:584 reply

          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.

          • By teiferer 2026-01-146:31

            > 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.

          • By geysersam 2026-01-147:05

            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?

          • By tomcam 2026-01-145:111 reply

            > You need to 2x+ the transportation cost of all products... Companies also need to double their specializations and adopt recycling processes that will largely be redundant with other companies

            I think 3rd parties would spring up to deal with that stuff

            • By __d 2026-01-145:292 reply

              Agreed. Companies could “outsource” their recycling obligations to local (national, regional, whatever) providers.

              • By adrianN 2026-01-147:45

                Maybe they could use big trucks that just collect all refuse from the curb. And maybe that is something that the city should do so that we don’t have a dozen trucks collecting a dozen different trash cans from every house.

              • By CableNinja 2026-01-145:541 reply

                That was tried, and what ultimately occured was disgusting.

                The world was full of new computers popping up and every middle class or above person buying new ones like they do with iphones now. Companies started recycling programs, and many immediately went the route of corruption. They would pack up shipping containers full of ewaste, with 40-50% reusable items, and the rest junk, allowing them to skirt the rules. These containers would end up in 3rd world countries, with people standing over a burning pile of ewaste, filtering out reusable metals. There was, at one point, even images of children doing this work. The usable items were sold dirt cheap, with no data erasing, leading to large amounts of data theft, and being able to buy pages of active credit card numbers for a dollar.

                We are talking about less critical things now, like vape pens, but its not a far throw for it to instantly become an actually bad idea to let other companies do the recycling. Make the manufacturer deal with it, or even the city/state, via public intake locations (like was mentioned of switzerland in another part of this thread)

                • By teiferer 2026-01-146:331 reply

                  Why past tense? That's describing exacty the world we are living in right now.

                  • By CableNinja 2026-01-1415:10

                    As far as i know a large portion of what i described shutdown after it came to light, although i would not be the least bit surprised if it was still happening in some capacity, or even in full under the disguise of something else

          • By venturecruelty 2026-01-145:111 reply

            Consider that there are some things society can and should do that are independent of the profit motive, hm?

            • By lostlogin 2026-01-145:29

              The full cost of product has externalised the waste bit, and made it the customer and societies problem.

      • By Waterluvian 2026-01-143:581 reply

        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.

        • By Earw0rm 2026-01-145:491 reply

          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.

          • By teiferer 2026-01-146:36

            You don't need to get it perfect though. The right incentives get you most of the way. Perfect is the enemy of good.

      • By lostlogin 2026-01-145:251 reply

        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.

        • By bloppe 2026-01-145:593 reply

          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_...

          • By defrost 2026-01-146:081 reply

            You are boldly and confidently at odds with the usual explanations of the formation of oil:

            * https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Oil_formation

            * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum

            these other sources all assert that

               The origin of fossil fuels is the anaerobic decomposition of buried dead organisms, particularly planktons and algae.

            • By aaronblohowiak 2026-01-146:261 reply

              I think they are conflating Carboniferous Period / white rot slowing _coal_ formation with Oil formation.

              • By bloppe 2026-01-1416:33

                Ah, yep. Did conflate coal with oil. I guess my nice analogy doesn't quite hold, but the point stands that plastic originally came from organic matter and is technically biodegradable.

          • By lostlogin 2026-01-146:27

            > 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.

          • By Eisenstein 2026-01-147:34

            The ecosystem will be fine, the question is whether we are going to be part of it.

      • By rvba 2026-01-143:57

        Because it has to start somewhere.

        Also many countries collect disposable plastic.

      • By Ericson2314 2026-01-145:461 reply

        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 :)

        • By jaggederest 2026-01-147:01

          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.

      • By sneak 2026-01-1416:47

        Stopping there makes sense because plastic sitting in a landfill isn’t harmful. Lithium batteries require special hazmat procedures.

      • By erfgh 2026-01-1411:59

        It will raise the costs and the prices, people will be unhappy and this will result in far-right populist parties taking over.

      • By dyauspitr 2026-01-146:24

        Yes let’s burden any fledging company with the added bureaucracy of having to set up trash collection, disposal and recycling.

      • By hippo22 2026-01-144:433 reply

        Why is trash an "enormous externality"? Even if the retailer took it back it would still be... trash.

        • By small_scombrus 2026-01-144:56

          > 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.

        • By schrodinger 2026-01-144:541 reply

          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.

          • By loeg 2026-01-145:281 reply

            Trash disposal (to regulated landfills, not beaches) is enormously inexpensive and increasing the cost of every item through a laborious return program doesn't improve anything.

            • By lostlogin 2026-01-145:331 reply

              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.

              • By loeg 2026-01-145:352 reply

                > Nearly all the plastic humans have made still exists.

                And it just doesn't matter. It's a tiny amount of mass / volume.

                > The great garbage patch in the Pacific is growing fast.

                Ocean plastics are almost entirely a consequence of (particularly Indonesian) fishing net waste, not Western consumer products disposed of in managed landfills. The "great garbage patch" is also very much overstating the scale of the problem; it's a slightly higher plastic density region of ocean.

                • By lostlogin 2026-01-146:231 reply

                  > And it just doesn't matter. It's a tiny amount of mass / volume.

                  Are you sure? It’s getting into food. We are eating it and drinking it, and it’s getting more prevalent.

                  • By Dylan16807 2026-01-1412:49

                    It's not getting there from competent landfills, and there are many many competent landfills. An elaborate return program wouldn't do better.

                • By Earw0rm 2026-01-145:532 reply

                  Go on, give us some numbers.

                  Because 7Bn people multiplied by a few kg/year doesn't seem trivial to me, but sounds like you can prove it.

                  • By hippo22 2026-01-146:362 reply

                    The main thing about plastic is that it’s made from oil, and oil already exists in the ground. Putting it back into the ground is basically neutral minus the pollution involved in manufacturing.

                    • By Earw0rm 2026-01-147:061 reply

                      Right, but there's ground and there's ground.

                      Geological strata vs shallow landfill sitting above aquifers and subject to near-term erosion.

                      Disposing of this stuff in deep mines seems like it'd be fine, unfortunately we haven't yet, at a society/economy level, found the discipline to do so. Presumably after a few mya of heat and pressure it'll be indistinguishable from other petrochemicals (which aren't particularly nice to begin with).

                      • By hippo22 2026-01-1419:39

                        I don't think disposing of stuff deep in mines would be a good idea as it would be easy to contaminate the ground water. Modern landfills are generally well engineered and don't contaminate the surroundings too badly.

                    • By dTal 2026-01-148:18

                      It doesn't go "back in the ground" though, does it? It gets scattered all over the ecology. When you take something that was buried deep and scatter it all over the surface - especially when that something is oil - that's usually considered an ecological disaster. Deepwater Horizon, the worst oil spill in history, has had catastrophic effects on the local wildlife, and it is still dwarfed in scale by the amount of plastic annually strewn to the four corners of the Earth.

                  • By dmurray 2026-01-146:391 reply

                    7 billion kg at the density of water would fit in a cube 200 m on each side.

                    All the plastic ever produced could be stuffed back into one medium size coal mine. There are thousands of such mines and they are already ecologically disruptive.

                    It's a large amount when you think about the logistics to move it around the world, but a small amount compared to the total amount of stuff we take out of the earth.

        • By throwmeoutplzdo 2026-01-144:501 reply

          It should be at a minimum stored safely. How and why are the environmental effects not a factor for you?

          • By loeg 2026-01-145:291 reply

            Regular trash is already stored safely.

            • By lostlogin 2026-01-145:331 reply

              The great pacific garbage patch disagrees.

              • By loeg 2026-01-1417:15

                As mentioned in the other thread, ocean plastics have nothing to do with landfill-disposed trash. They're mostly fishing nets waste, and at that, mostly from mismanagement by a handful of poor countries.

                I'll assume good faith here and that you were simply unaware of the origins of the so-called great garbage patch, but in future discussions I think it would do your arguments some credence not to bring up ocean plastics in response to discussion about landfills.

    • By SlightlyLeftPad 2026-01-147:572 reply

      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.

      [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dy-wFixuRVU

      • By bjackman 2026-01-148:481 reply

        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.

        • By contravariant 2026-01-1410:241 reply

          > 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).

          • By bjackman 2026-01-1420:17

            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".

      • By dan-robertson 2026-01-149:191 reply

        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.

        • By loops 2026-01-1413:05

          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

    • By pjmlp 2026-01-148:036 reply

      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.

      • By bojan 2026-01-149:412 reply

        > 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.

        • By nicbou 2026-01-1413:18

          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.

          https://allaboutberlin.com/guides/sorting-trash-in-germany

        • By pjmlp 2026-01-149:44

          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.

      • By jjice 2026-01-1414:572 reply

        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.

        • By estimator7292 2026-01-1418:08

          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.

        • By pjmlp 2026-01-1415:15

          The point is what happens to them when the container full of them ships away.

      • By rm30 2026-01-1413:51

        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.

      • By computersuck 2026-01-148:11

      • By tiagod 2026-01-1414:131 reply

        >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.

        • By pjmlp 2026-01-1414:25

          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.

      • By HighGoldstein 2026-01-1412:341 reply

        > 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.

        • By pjmlp 2026-01-1414:30

          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.

    • By Freedumbs 2026-01-147:592 reply

      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?

      • By RulerOf 2026-01-148:45

        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.

      • By subscribed 2026-01-1412:481 reply

        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.

        • By Freedumbs 2026-01-159:101 reply

          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?

          • By subscribed 2026-01-1513:181 reply

            Oh, I agree with you in this regard, but your take was... overtly simplistic in a crucial, key detail.

            Concerning litter presence in general - as much as the poor manners the distinct absence of the bins strongly amplifies the problem. At least in my country (pretty large western country) - most of the public spaces (streets, etc) lack ANY sort of the bin, and while it's easy to tuck the plastic wrapper from the food and take it home, I'd say people are much less inclined to carry a stinky cigarette but or leaking can for a couple of miles.

            • By Freedumbs 2026-01-1517:59

              Right. My point is nicotine addiction doesn't force littering.

    • By robertjpayne 2026-01-144:477 reply

      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.

      • By FractalParadigm 2026-01-145:072 reply

        > 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.

        • By normie3000 2026-01-145:36

          > 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.

        • By gosub100 2026-01-1413:03

          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?

      • By diffeomorphism 2026-01-148:29

        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.

      • By throwmeoutplzdo 2026-01-144:49

        How and why are the environmental effects not a factor for you?

      • By gnopgnip 2026-01-144:49

        I see more vape litter on the beach than bottles and cans. The deposit is part of why that is

      • By computersuck 2026-01-148:12

        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

      • By seemaze 2026-01-144:501 reply

        I just received a $10 deposit refund for returning my motorcycle battery to the battery shop.

        • By zelon88 2026-01-145:302 reply

          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.

          • By pests 2026-01-146:501 reply

            I never thought about it but it is odd car-components are the only thing most people will experience with a "core" charge. Why don't more industries do something similar? Is it just because car ownership and car repair has been such a core (no pun intended) component of American culture? That a system of recycling has been set up?

            • By tstrimple 2026-01-1416:33

              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.

          • By mindslight 2026-01-146:32

            Lead actually has a pretty good scrap value.

    • By lagniappe 2026-01-143:522 reply

      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.

      • By margalabargala 2026-01-144:14

        Yes, that is also how the deposit on a can of soda works.

      • By calvinmorrison 2026-01-144:183 reply

        i pay 25c to leave my cart in the lot

        • By anonym29 2026-01-144:301 reply

          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.

          • By calvinmorrison 2026-01-1416:36

            big words for you. I pay for it.

            If i do not pay, i always return the cart.

        • By triceratops 2026-01-1415:06

          Someone else brings it back and makes 25c. Win-win. That's how any deposit program works.

        • By pests 2026-01-146:52

          Congrats.

    • By csomar 2026-01-148:35

      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.

    • By tjohns 2026-01-145:072 reply

      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.

      • By Domenic_S 2026-01-145:31

        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...

      • By mamonoleechi 2026-01-148:161 reply

        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

        • By tjohns 2026-01-1420:14

          Sure, but the people doing the recycling have no idea what's inside of it.

    • By hennell 2026-01-149:141 reply

      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.

      • By xmprt 2026-01-1420:28

        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.

    • By fennecfoxy 2026-01-1411:251 reply

      You think China is gonna take all of em back?

      • By subscribed 2026-01-1412:391 reply

        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).

        • By fennecfoxy 2026-01-1417:02

          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.

    • By flexagoon 2026-01-149:08

      I've seen some universities in my country have deposit boxes specifically for single-use vapes

    • By comonoid 2026-01-1410:41

      God bless these horrible devices are not disposed in billions every day as bottles are!

    • By eru 2026-01-148:311 reply

      > 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.

      • By lm28469 2026-01-148:39

        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

  • By kev009 2026-01-143:433 reply

    "I Powered My House Using 500 Disposable vapes" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dy-wFixuRVU

    • By GCUMstlyHarmls 2026-01-148:223 reply

      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.

      • By lachiflippi 2026-01-1411:201 reply

        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.

        • By squigz 2026-01-1412:331 reply

          Are you referring to VG/PG? Are they really that expensive for you? That's wild.

          • By lachiflippi 2026-01-1414:322 reply

            Yes, 100ml from the same store I bought a liter from for 40€ in 2015 now cost 56€. There is currently a tax of 0.32€ per ml on liquid, no matter if you're buying the base or the finished product.

            • By xmprt 2026-01-1420:311 reply

              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?

              • By squigz 2026-01-152:13

                The 400 euro figure was for a liter, while the 56 euro price is for 100ml

            • By squigz 2026-01-1415:00

              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.

      • By Dilettante_ 2026-01-1411:071 reply

        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.

        • By Nextgrid 2026-01-1411:55

          The puff number was extremely exaggerated on the disposable ones I've tried.

      • By kentiko 2026-01-149:24

        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

    • By ch4s3 2026-01-143:541 reply

      What a brave and adventurous soul.

      • By avidiax 2026-01-145:541 reply

        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...

        • By CGamesPlay 2026-01-146:481 reply

          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).

          • By superxpro12 2026-01-1417:20

            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.

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