Are they an egregious form of Ewaste really? (Serious question). Because there’s so much reusable hardware in so many of the other things we throw out (phones, cars, laptops, etc) but we don’t make reasonable efforts to limit that. I’d love if the vape hardware was standardized to a degree for cool reuse projects like this. Donate a bunch of used vapes as hardware platforms for school projects? Like arduinos…but not.
IMO the most egregious part is that all of these vapes come with perfectly good rechargable lithium batteries at a time where lithium is one of the most important resources.
And they all just go into a landfill without ever being recharged once. It really should be criminal.
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.
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.
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.
Most of these vapes are reusable as vapes. They just get sold as disposable and the manufacturers don't include a refill mechanism.
I am very strongly pro-vape more generally but disposable ones should absolutely be illegal. They only serve to a) make them more attractive to casual users (instead of people switching from tobacco) and b) generate waste. Zero benefit to society.
There was a time when people could argue "the upfront cost of a proper vape is a problem that could keep people from switching from cigarettes". That's no longer true, there are incredibly cheap and compact refillable vapes now. (Well, there kinda always were, but they used to be crap. No longer).
The solution here isn't reuse it's just to stop production of them completely.