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Comment by Scoundreller | Hacker News Reader

The rechargeable lithium batteries in those really doesn't fit the "lithium shortage" and "we don't have enough battery capacity to build an EV for everyone" narrative

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It takes around 850g of lithium carbonate to produce one kWh of lithium batteries. The current market price for lithium carbonate is about $14/kg. The base spec Tesla Model 3 has a 57.5kWh battery pack, so the lithium in the pack represents a cost of ~$685, or just under 2% of the list price of the vehicle.

A typical disposable vape contains about five cents worth of lithium.

https://www.irena.org/-/media/Files/IRENA/Agency/Technical-P...

Another post in this thread mentions 1.8 million disposable vapes being sold per week in Australia. So that corresponds to 131 EV batteries per week. Or roughly 48000 EV batteries per year. 87000 EVs were registered in Australia in 2023.

Make of that what you want, but disposable electronics to administer nicotine seem to be a major waste.

It actually fits the narrative pretty well

The materials for one EV battery can make ~30 e-bikes, and currently EVs are too expensive for most people.

The way to fix that and the way that industry is fixing it is to make batteries more efficient (higher-density, new anodes/cathodes) in parallel with making a bunch more of them (and mining more lithium).

If we succeed in making a $25k EV, the batteries used in those vapes will be _even cheaper_.

I don’t think it’s desirable and I find the waste appalling, but I do think that disposable batteries can only be expected to grow without intervention.

It does if the vape makers have an underpriced lithium source and don’t care about the pending lithium shortage.

they're just buying off-the-shelf cylindrical or flat-pack li-ion cells

A popular theory is that they use "QC reject" grade, as the batteries often have arount 800 mAh capacity, two times less than most basic commercial grade.

One car has 4,500 cells - bigger cells than most of the vapes. So it really is a matter of scale.

How many cars does one smoke in a year though?

Hopefully zero! Still, if you replace your car (or its battery) every 10 years (pretty long IMO) and smoke one vape a day (yikes), you'll use more cells on your car than your vapes.

I hope someone who replaces their car every 10 years isn’t just sending the old one to the compactor when they’re done with it

For one, 10 years is a perfectly good used car for somebody, and for two with large EV battery packs we’d expect some lithium recycling effort

Disposable vapes don’t have either of those going for them, batteries go straight in the trash after one charge cycle

I would hope that too. I imagine that as long as the pack still works, most cars will be sold forward on the used market. If the pack fails (either due to cell death or a crash or whatever), I bet many of them will not be properly recycled, especially from the early days. Once most cars are EVs, recycling will probably get better.

Either way, it seems pretty unfair to assume that EV packs will be 100% recycled, while vape packs will be 0% recycled. One could imagine a sort of "core charge" for disposable vapes. Bring the vape back for recycling when you get a new one and get $2 off. This could even be done by law like California CRV for cans and bottles.

Do not give those guys ideas

The kind of people who can afford to buy EVs buy a new car what, every 3 years? So I guess about 1/3 of a car (or, using the numbers from another comment, about 4000 vapes' worth).

The car is recycled, while the vapes are sent to the landfill.

I thought a Tesla smoked them all..

I'll show myself out!

The lithium in those cheap disposable things are less "lithium" and more "metallic powder/paste that theoretically contains elements of lithium." It's not something you'd want to actually use in anything important like a car battery

Not true. "Disposable" vapes use commodity li-ion cells, of the same basic type that you'd find in a cellphone, a laptop or an EV. They probably aren't the best quality, but there's nothing unusual about the chemistry or packaging. Li-ion cells are the preferred chemistry because of the very high discharge rate - alkaline or primary lithium cells just can't deliver enough current. The cell is perfectly capable of being recharged, but some people prefer the convenience of a disposable device and manufacturers are quite happy to respond to that demand.

It's wasteful, I don't particularly approve of it, I expect to see a lot of jurisdiction ban disposable vapes, but nor do I think it's particularly egregious or meaningfully impacting on the commodity price of lithium carbonate.

https://hackaday.com/2022/05/05/2022-hackaday-prize-disposab...

some people prefer the convenience of a disposable device

I don't understand this. Instead of plugging it into a charger, they'd rather go to the store to buy another, or more likely order online and wait for it to be delivered?

it's the convenience. If they had the executive function to get them online, they would save money and get a reusable device instead.

I introduced a battery charger to a group of people that used disposable vapes and the knowhow to charge them. It changed the way they interacted with the vapes completely even saying funny high ideas like "we should patent this".

i don't have personal experience with this, but i imagine so, because if you plug your vape into a charger, you can smoke it in an hour or two, and if you buy a cigarette at the convenience store that's a block away, you can smoke it in two minutes

maybe you live somewhere without convenience stores

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