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Comment by alisonkisk | Hacker News Reader

Look at an airpod. Why should the battery be consumable but not the airpod? They have about the same amount of electronics. The average airpod user throws out more than an airpod's worth of plastic per day. I get junk mail with electronic trash that is bigger than an airpod.

Airpods are used with iPhones that have 20x the amount of electronics, so should last 20x as long.

People's real concern is the price which is higher than they guess because they think airpods are like regular headphones in longevity.

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This was exactly my thought when I saw the headline. The air pods are so small, they're not contributing a large part to plastic waste.

It's the same story with trying to get rid of plastic straws.

In both cases, I don't want to dismiss the problem - it's just that there are bigger fish to fry to make a much large impact to the bottom line of plastic pollution.

Now, after reading through the "Our Story" of Podswap's website, I can see that the real selling point is: "Our batteries keep dying prematurely, and we don't want to fork over the cash for a whole new pair."

Recycling is great - keep it as a value proposition, but it shouldn't be the main marketing push here.

> It's the same story with trying to get rid of plastic straws.

The plastic straw thing is not to make an impact on the environment, it was chosen to make an impact on everyone's life.

Yes, we could do something bigger, but people won't notice because they can't see the effect in their day to day life.

Ban plastic straws though and EVERYONE notices and talks about it constantly everywhere. And if even one person starts using less plastic because of that, it was a success.

If someone feels they are already doing their part by sacrificing the convenience of plastic straws, how does this make them more likely to reduce plastic use elsewhere in their life? I would expect the opposite.

> And if even one person starts using less plastic because of that, it was a success.

I can buy not relying on the first order impacts of banning plastic straws for the coat-benefit analysis, but relying on second-order effects doesn’t mean you get to toss out cost-benefit altogether.

I disagree. I think if anything, it'll lead to people being more angry/disillusioned about recycling. It's the equivalent of your teacher/parent/manager micromanaging you on trivial tasks. Let the person figure out what they want to do but make sweeping changes that are meaningful (e.g. reg cap on companies producing/importing disposable plastic goods).

This strikes me as the same basic reasoning as blocking traffic to protest various social causes.

If you're "making an impact on everyone's life" in the form of making their lives more annoying and inconvenient, those people are going to resent you and the cause for which you inconvenienced them.

Maybe that calc changes when you look at environmental effects of having to keep manufacturing new chips.

Yeah I think just the shipping for sending airpods back and forth (in a shipping bag) could come close to the waste of just buying a new pair.

Where are the electronics in the battery?

Every Li-ion battery has a control circuit in it. Batteries stopped being just containers of electrons a long while ago.

All high-capacity batteries need a management chip.

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