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

> 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.

> 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?

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

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

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...

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?

> 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

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.

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.

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.

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_...

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.

> Even if the retailer took it back it would still be... trash.

Yes, but making them deal with it would create a massive incentive to either reduce the amount of rubbish they make, or to make it recyclable/processable.

It's an externality because the entity that sold it to you doesn't have to pay the consequences of dealing with the trash. OP said "dispose of it properly," which could mean a lot of things, all of which are better than leaving it on a beach.

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

> 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.

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.

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.

Congrats.

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).

the insulators on which could contain beryllium oxide

As far as I can tell, this is an urban legend. No consumer microwave oven has ever used beryllium in its magnetron insulators. Military radar ones, yes (and likely where the legend started.) Some specialist test equipment and RF transmitters too, and they all contain prominent warnings of it. Besides its toxicity, it's far more expensive than regular alumina.

Sort of. "Single use disposables" were banned, but the companies switched immediately to a two-part unit which, AFAICT, is still used and thrown away in exactly the same fashion.

I haven’t been back since February last year. I guess a win for some people!

The fault lies with vape manufacturers. It’s big tobacco. They are soulless ghouls.

I think just an oversight—disposables weren't really around at the time the time that the ban happened. 2019, people were mostly smoking Juul and having those crazy custom rigs that they fill with the juice. Disposables really started to take off around 2021 - 2022. Atleast that's what I saw with people around me in NY and California.

Yeah, in my state, with disposable I can get any flavor. But if I want juice or pods, I can only get nasty tobacco flavor. It's an easy choice.

Also, when you do get juice online or from other states, it doesn't hit as hard / the same as whatever they put in the disposables. Someone told me it's because the disposables have vitamin E acetate in them that makes the nicotine get absorbed into your blood quicker.

I think the disposables go around more regulations, which mean the chinese manufacturers can put more addictive stuff in the pods / disposables.

If true I wonder if that has to do with this incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%932020_vaping_lung_...

Everyone I know who vapes nicotine is a junkie about it.

In fact, nicotine habits can be harder to kick than heroin. I know plenty of people who have tried to kick nicotine many times and cannot stay off of it.

Anyway, it's moot, because outright banning tobacco is insane.

There aren't really alcohol or cannabis junkies like heroin either. That didn't make prohibition or the war on drugs successful.

There were two countries in the 20th century which tried to ban alcohol. Both had a.. very lasting consequences.

You can't "just ban" it or "ban it properly". You would get a very nasty black market and things with such ban.

Wow that is stupid. NZ banned disposable or non-rechargeable vapes only, refillable/pod-swappable and rechargeable ones are still on sale.

They're not all banned, you just need a prescription to get one which realistically should've been implemented day 0.

Eventually it'll prove very impactful with the youth, it'll reduce the number of users and make it more cost prohibitive to be so prolific as it is right now.

> If alcohol came inside of little battery powered computers, we should ban those too.

I too am agnostic but do not understand this reasoning. BTW let me get severely downvoted by saying that if alcohol prohibition came up for a vote I'd vote yes in a heartbeat.

Thanks for the clarification, I can see banning disposable vapes but still allowing reusable ones.

Prohibition works to stop some people.

It doesn't stop addicts from craving and it doesn't curb the appeal of the product. People who think tobacco/nicotine bans would work are people who think they don't have any positive effect associated with them.

People don't smoke because the evil cigarette companies tricked them and now they are addicted. It's a drug, it feels good to do it.

A tobacco/nicotine ban will end up exactly like aby other recreational drug prohibition.