Elevated toxic element emissions from popular disposable e-cigarettes | Hacker News Reader

Elevated toxic element emissions from popular disposable e-cigarettes

ucdavis.edu

45 pointsgeox7 comments

There's a lot more to cigarette toxicity than heavy metals. For example, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, one of the main contributors to DNA damage/carcinogenicity in smoking, are orders of magnitude higher in cigs than in vaping. While I support vape regulation, acting as if it can't be mechanistically justified harm reduction is silly.

Kids are not buying these for harm reduction. Neither are adults for that matter.

I successfully weaned myself off of nicotine with a vape box. It involved months of slowly tapering the nicotine levels until it felt silly and pointless to stand outside with it in my mouth. It’s a controlled process.

I had an actual vape box with replaceable battery, wick, and adjustable to get the hit just right to mimic smoking. Any adult with a habit is not buying trash devices every day and tossing them.

I don’t see a market for disposable vapes outside of cannabis tourists or kids who want a stealth head rush without collecting any paraphernalia

The title is clickbait and misleading. Even though it is the original from the university press release, it should be changed for HN.

From the study:

>We identified the illicit use of leaded bronze in nonheating device components in contact with e-liquid as the source of Pb.

The abstract continues to say that lead levels were particularly elevated in the vape products from one manufacturer, which is not reported for the other two manufacturers whose products were tested. You can find it here:

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acscentsci.5c00641

I've often wondered if lead in products is part of an intentional attack on the Western world. Maybe it's just a side effect of lowering production costs, but it could also be an attack to make a nation sick and stupid. The lack of product testing makes it particularly easy to do. There may be laws against using lead in products, but it seems to be found repeatedly, and there does not seem to be much actual testing.

This is sad to hear since we have vaping rebuildable material that's way less harmful available.

The craze about disposable vapes is likely to come from teens and young adults who don't want to take the time to learn how to use a rebuildable vape and how to clean it. Also, it's easier to buy a disposable vape, use it, then throw it away.

I think that most of them are manufactured in China (to be profitable as one-time use with cheap labor), and although their factories seem to be of good condition, the materials they use to store the e-liquid and the heating part are surely well engineered but must lack some safety when consumed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1ejAucYL0w -> Video of a vape manufacturing factory

Although the videos I've seen show mainly how the vapes are put together, not where the parts are created (which might be even more important to be of a high quality standard).

For the e-liquid storage:

They seem to use some sort of foam inside the e-liquid tank, which must serve to spread the e-liquid and let the user vape in any position. In traditional vapes, we just have some cotton to absorb the e-liquid through capillarity which guides it to the heating coil, but if we put the vape upside down or sideways some part of the cotton might not be in contact with the e-liquid and we would get a dry hit (burning the cotton and the heating coil gets hotter than when there's e-liquid present that vaporizes and cools it).

https://youtu.be/WohEiRvn2Dg?si=2mugWxWaBwd04T9u&t=71 -> Foam they use in the e-liquid tank

For the vaporizer / heating coils:

Lead and Antimony aren't supposed to be found in there (it has no use in the heating process / coil). For the Nickel, it must be the wire used to control the temperature of the coil and is indeed problematic if inhaled. We have better options with Kanthal A1 (ferritic iron-chromium-aluminium alloy) and stainless 316 steel wire if they want to control the temperature (even though Nickel is the most reliable to control the temperature).

https://youtu.be/WohEiRvn2Dg?si=O5fU1XUX1lwwBKBj

To end this comment, I find it concerning that they use this title without any education in mind, since most of the studies, when vulgarized by a journalist, are not always digging deep enough. We end up with a wrong interpretation and here it gives a bad vibe of "don't vape, it's harmful, go back to smoking cigarettes." Teens are not supposed to vape or smoke, but young adults must be educated, especially if they are trying to quit smoking, that instead of going back to cigarettes they should seek a professional shop where they can buy better products which are safer.

are we shocked?

I would be. To me it's obvious that some of these devices would emit heavy metals, and they don't name names, but I'd expect some brands to be better than verus cheap no-name gas station grade vapes. The latter unfortunately is likely most accessible to those who want them.

But at the same time, you can only heat up a lowest-possible-cost element to vaporization temperatures so many times before things break down, or the liquid runs out and the user tries to get a few last pulls from it. I've tasted an empty vape before - it's nasty, it tastes like burnt metal and yet some will use it up until that point.

On the other hand, when the vape is 1) a decent brand 2) hasn't been overused 3) isn't nearly empty, I would expect it to perform signficantly better on harmful vapors tests than combusting a toxic plant and breathing it in.

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