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Comment by ChocolateGod | Hacker News Reader

I think a lot of people outside Europe will see this as overreach by the state, but given waste cleanup is paid for by the tax payer and is an ever increasing cost/problem, banning products needlessly adding to rubbish when inexpensive reusable alternatives makes sense.

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I think you mean "a lot of people in the USA" :) In most of the other parts of the world, people would either see the wisdom of this approach because they understand good government, or not bat an eyelid because they're used to bad government (and consequently overreach).

Well the EU smokes more than the US so it's also just a bigger problem there.

Not so much, for e cigarettes :

% of users between 01/23 and 03/23, top countries:

Indonesia 32

Switzerland 30

Italia 25

UK 24

USA 23

[french] https://fr.statista.com/infographie/19421/part-des-fumeurs-q...

Also can’t find the source but I read they more prevalent for richer, more educated, urban people.

US wide averages for smoking are pretty useless. It varies a lot from region to region. It’s like taking the average of Europe, the continent.

Anyway, as someone from the states, I think banning disposable electronics is a great idea in general. E-cigs seem like a great place to start.

Yeah in the Netherlands most young people don't smoke anymore. In Spain a lot of them do and people even smoke in clubs etc while this is banned EU wide.

It doesn't bother me at all but it does happen.

He said smoke not just e-cigarette.

Far more serious is that these disposable vapes are easily accessible to kids as young as 12. Literally one third of the kids in my child's secondary school are vaping in the toilets between classes. It would be much harder to do this if they had to pay for and use a large permanent vape . It's an epidemic and that is not hyperbole. The environmental gains of this ban are just icing on the cake.

I am one of these people that think its overreach.

People find some value in this product. Enough so they're buying it even though its expensive and potentially hazardous to their health. All the problems associated with that problem should be managed. We should have technology to manage the waste. It's an engineering problem and I'd much rather prefer that we engineer technology to serve what people want than try to engineer humans to adapt to limitations of our technology.

The most absurd manifestation of this attitude is an image heating people vs heating spaces and tries to unironically argue that people should prefer to live in cold spaces and just adapt with things like cozy furniture, warm clothes, hot drinks and local heating. Real dystopian stuff to anyone who has lived like this.

https://sketchplanations.com/heating-people-heating-spaces

Nowhere does that post or the image argue that people should prefer one over the other. Wearing warmer clothes instead of turning up the heater isn't a bad thing either, so I don't understand your hostility towards the idea?

Well, on the other hand, we as a society should be able to decide if we want to allow some people to make $billions selling purely addictive substances to other people in our society. And whether they get to mass produce a bunch of e-waste in their pursuit of those $billions that the rest of society has to deal with.

The personal choice aspect is actually the lesser consideration.

Disposable vapes are also causing a lot of garbage truck fires now.

Throwing battery into trash can is a bad idea. And make the battery unremovable from trash is obviously even worse.

The state is responsible of public health and waste management anyways and those useless disposable vapes falls on these two categories.

>but given waste cleanup is paid for by the tax payer and is an ever increasing cost/problem, banning products needlessly adding to rubbish when inexpensive reusable alternatives makes sense.

Why not tax it instead?

Another option would be to tax for the negative externality of waste disposal

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