this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2026
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This further illustrates how absolutely crazy it is to produce these devices for a single use and then just throw them away, not even making sure they can be recycled properly. It's complete madness. I hope they'll be banned soon, I think the EU is working on it.
They should absolutely ban disposable but as long as they're smart about it and don't try and make it a general vape ban. Anything with a microcontroller and OLED display should need regulation to be "disposable". So fucking wasteful.
Vapes can and have always been something you can pop a battery and cartridge and custom juice in. There's zero reason to make it disposable. Make the coil/cotton/juice cartridge disposable... Like a juul was last I checked? That's reasonable.
And then next regulate how much nicotine can be in per ml. 60mg/ml is fucking insane. That is heart issue level of nicotine. I got buzzed off 12 mg/ml, used 3 or 6mg/ml regularly, and quit at 1.5mg/ml. There's no fucking reason other than harm and addiction to provide 60mg/ml.
Germany only allows 20mg/ml, I didn't know there were countries that allowed 60??? 😭
OLED maybe but small micros are now so cheap and so small that they're negligible.
Battery is probably still the biggest environmental impact.
One of those 3 cent one time programmable microcontrollers would be sufficient. Something with enough power to run a web server is just wasteful.
You do realize that a 1 cent microcontroller has enough RAM, Flash and processing power to be a web server, correct?
And the term web server doesn't mean it has to run the whole of AWS. It just means it can deliver some content over http.
Yeah, I doubt it's running more than a couple concurrent connections. Idle web servers take very little resources.
Getting ever closer to smart dust.
https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2023/07/10/council-adopts-new-regulation-on-batteries-and-waste-batteries/
Coming soon...
Disposable vapes are already forbidden, at least in France, idk if it is union wide.
But yeah, those things make no sense. The only thing with a battery that should be disposable would be fire alarm. Not because of the battery, but because the main sensor has a 10 years lifespan due to its natural deterioration.
I feel the same way about earpods.
Compared to a vape pen AirPods have insane life span. It's still bad, but not even in the same ballpark as something you usually throw away in a week or so.
You can also have your dying AirPods replaced at the battery rate of $40 too. Still doesn’t strike the overall problem, especially since Apple doesn’t advertise that replacement.
That's fine for airpods but as someone who worked retail, there's just as many $15 earbuds that break near instantly that have to be thrown away and never fixed. Those things have 3 batteries in them.
yeah, no one ever loses an airpod...
oh wait
Not sure what you mean. Are you implying that because on occasion some people will lose an AirPod they are somehow worse than vape pods that are designed to be disposed of within days after first use?
people who like the concept don't give a fuck about the environment, it's just convenient for them so fuck it.
I'm sure you'll justify it for yourself lol.
you don't need them, you just like them, and don't care that it's created an entire new class of ewaste.
People lose phones more often, huge source of e-waste that we should ban first. In fact most people wouldn't even have a reason to buy the earbuds if they didn't have a phone in the first place.
something tells me they don't just evaporate, never to be used used again, but resold.
hard to resell a single earbud.