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Comment by jdsully | Hacker News Reader

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!

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