This is backwards, it's not about eliminating the landfill, it's about recovering the materials which were previously not scarce but now are or will be soon.

> carbon neutral

No. Poorly separated wastes in landfill cause non-trivial methane emissions and other VOCs [0]. While leachate _may_ be captured, most of the time methane is definitely not.

[0] - https://www.epa.gov/lmop/basic-information-about-landfill-ga...

I think it’s less about managing the environmental impact of landfills and more about eventually the concentration of desirable materials in landfills may end up higher than in known natural deposits. Or at least easier to refine and separate.

Landfills are likely chock full of Aluminum, Nickel-Cadmium, Lithium, copper, brass, and all sorts of useful metals and chemicals.

Sure, the grand majority is going to be food waste, but if you threw it all into an incinerator and melted down the ashes there is probably a decent blend of valuable material mixed in with the waste.

How is plastic on bread related with food poisoning? Here in France baguettes are wrapped in paper and are eaten within a day or two of being made (or else they get dry). if you keep them for long enough, molds will grow on it, then you see them and don't eat that old bread (even though it's unlikely to be too bad for most people, the taste is certainly not great). I'd be surprised if anyone ever got food poisoned with bread.

What will happen to the price of plastic when demand for oil starts reducing for mobility and heating with the move to electricity energy?

somebody once said oil is too valuable to burn for fuel. the important part are the petrochemicals, but the demand for fuel is so high that's where the money is

Environmentally, there is very little difference at the landfill if the PCB has an 8 bit microcontroller or a 64 bit ARM chip.

The only environment-friendly solution is to forbid this product to exist in the first place.

It's not so much that 99% go to the landfill, but this product does. Other products that use the same parts might be more reusable.

The point is that, most likely, the controller existed before this vape. Buying an off the shelf part can be cheaper than trying to bring up some custom part, both in cost and possibly in overall resources.

A combination of:

- humans are expensive.

- If you want a custom part, you will need specialized equipment to build that part.

- If you want a custom part, you will maybe need to transport that part all around the world, while the off-the-shelf components might already be available close to your assembly plant.

I wonder how many of preppers has mask images in their archives. Manufacturing primitive integrated circuits theoretically don't require digitally controlled machinery.

If I scavenge any machine today, how likely would I be to find a 6502 vs something more modern? I’d argue that some people might have a NES at home and one could get a 2A03 from it, but in a hypothetical scenario where I need to scavenge some computational power, I’d find an Android phone

OK. It would be nice though if Collapse OS contained tools to build an AMD Ryzen.

Guess where that lithium came from in the first place? It's just going back where it came from, in a more processed form, for "storage" until miners get to it in the future.

I have a (fire resistant) bag full of these batteries.

A hammer, a gentle swing, and some clippers are pretty much all you need to get the batteries out of these disposable vapes.

FWIW a ban came into force this summer in the UK. Rare W. Hopefully the rest of the world follows suit in time.

They're cheap because they're produced in the millions if not billions. At that scale, each individual unit becomes disgustingly cheap. Some factory in China is pumping them out as fast as possible and slapping on the brand name of whoever is buying.

[flagged]

Because they contain so much more nicotine they are way more addicting, way better for the lungs than smoking but still bad for cardiovascular health. Disposables should be illegal for environmental protection reasons, that's a bit unrelated though since these companies can very easily switch to reusable/pod-systems.

We want people to vape rather than smoke tobacco, obviously, it's not a zero-sum issue.

While that does vaguely gesture at an increased nicotine consumption, it's pretty meaningless without the corresponding consumption rates. My gut suspects the average smoker goes through a pack of cigarettes a lot faster than the typical vaper goes through a rechargeable disposable vape.

I'm not sure what your point is here.

1) They don't sell for $3-4 a pack, yet your post seems to imply that the system has failed for cigarettes.

2) For externalities beyond the input cost of a product, the default [natural] condition is for those costs not to be included - one needn't enforce anything. Rather, it requires that someone with power put their thumb on the scale to enforce the inclusion of those costs during a sale[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigouvian_tax

Juul was very popular and less wasteful (although not perfect of course) as you disposed of the liquid pod rather than the whole device, they were regulated out of existence though. The regulations had loophole/oversight which paved the way for the disposable vape era.

[dead]

...and consumption/dispersion/degradation of the finite/rare/precious resources used in the manufacturing process, which we could also factor in, if we wanted to be serious.

> Almost every electronic device becomes disposable at some point

And we're all gonna die, why would we have laws at all?

When we say "disposable vape", it's not to say "it will eventually stop working". It's more to say "you use it, you throw it away".

> E-waste recycling is a profitable

I don't doubt it's profitable, but it's most certainly not a good thing for the planet. Recycling is generally not a solution to waste.

> The problem here is planned obsolescence in a product's design. That is what needs to be made illegal.

Seriously? We're talking about DISPOSABLE VAPES. They are built to last as short a time as possible. At this point I am not sure if you think you disagree with me, are just nitpicking for the fun of it, or something else?

Sure, there is a need to draw a line somewhere. The plastic wrapping is disposable as well, and it's not always a solution to just not have it.

But a disposable vape is very clearly on the side of "should not exist, period".

Do I misunderstand what we mean with "disposable vapes"? It's not the first such comment I see.

When we talk about "disposable vapes", we don't talk about something that lasts 10 years, do we?

Or do you think that the very word "disposable" should not exist, because after all, nothing will last longer than the sun?

You throw away your smoke detector? Just replace the battery.

My guy is out here pulling off the whole thing and tossing it in the trash.

I realize it's a small part of a whole, but it's kind of hard to ignore the broad rejection of environmentalism that happened across-the-board in English-speaking Canada. Green Energy Act was hated and cancelled, eco-fees were hated and got cancelled, carbon pricing was hated and got cancelled, bike lanes are hated and got cancelled.

It seems like voters will reject any attempt to fight climate change if there is cost or inconvenience involved.

"thinking of inventing a new type of person to get mad at on here. maybe people who carry too many keys around.. i dont know yet"

-Dril

I think the current estimate is that there are almost a half a billion more Christians than Muslims (in 2025.)

One reason is that the number of Christians in Sub-Saharan Africa is growing. But extrapolating the trends, yes Islam will probably become the largest religion in the coming decades.

Or at least maybe - looking at birth rates, it seems as second generation muslim immigrants to Western countries have even lower birth rates than the native population. That might happen also in regions say like Pakistan and Indonesia and other fast growing regions, depending on economical or other changes.

> Islam is in fact the largest religion (by worshippers) in the world today, so Frank Herbert's assumption that a culture derived from it would be dominant in a future society is just extrapolation

Fyi,

> Dune is a 1965 epic science fiction novel by American author Frank Herber

The distinction you're making wrt Jihad is also super modern and did not apply back then

I hope gp goes on a tear about the Orange Catholic Bible next, and how outrageous its non-subtle references are.

It is.

not really, pretty old overview on it - but kept up to date it seems (current references to interviews)

https://baheyeldin.com/literature/arabic-and-islamic-themes-...

its true that the concept of a _holy war_ isnt unique to the muslim faith though. I never claimed that either however.

It's slightly surprising to me how few people seem to be aware of that in HN. Was expecting the general readership here to be a little less obsessively righteous and uninformed on a topic like this, but ymmv I guess

At least partly because ["woke"] sadly doesn't even remotely mean what it used to mean anymore. It's been "stolen" and abused by those who vehemently hate everything that any part of it has ever stood for.

[woke @ wikipedia]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woke

> Because most "woke" stuff is made up or blown out of proportion by people on the internet.

I think you are misinterpreting the issue. I'll explain why.

There are attention-seekers which were given access to platforms with unprecedented reach. Some of these types tap into outrage culture as their engagement mechanism. This creates a vicious cycle of outrage which feeds on outputting outrageous claims and taking the resulting outrage as input to further double down on outputting outrageous claims. You then end up with opposing outrage camps of whatever subject you can think of which exist to generate a larger volume of outrage than the opposing camp.

The problem is that the terminally-online types confuse this sort of discourse with reality, and the outrageous claims as representative of what happens in real life. That's how you end up with people outraged with outrageous claims that are so outrageous to the point they are unthinkable.