I live in a big house full of roommates and they think I am crazy when i ask to be given any trash that has a battery.

No I am not hoarding your "disposable" unrefillable vape pens with lithium ion batteries, I recycle everything properly.

How these vape pen businesses are still in business is beyond all rationality. They should all be shut down until every single vape pen is recovered from the dumps around the world.

I don't work in waste management, hopefully they have a process that captures these e-waste devices down stream. But I doubt it.

So many toys nowadays come with small batteries, lights, and circuits. I don’t know if lithium ion is worse than the batteries that come in cheap toys, but it is not clear that “billions” (nowhere near billions based on total AirPods sold from quick search) of wireless headphones in landfills is specifically worse than all the other consumption people do.

Also, the utility of AirPods (and other Apple devices) is huge. My wife and I have been using ours since mid 2020.

>Question: before Apple invented airpods, how many lithium ion battery powered headphones were in landfills? Nearly zero, because folks used wired headphones.

Bluetooth headphones existed prior to 2016 when the AirPods were released. Wireless headsets for phones were also very disposable. Wireless buds were also poor quality and didn't last.