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The UK Throws Away 1 Million Vapes Each Day, Causing ‘Environmental Nightmare’
(plantbasednews.org)
Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.
As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades:
How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world:
Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:
Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.
As far as I know despite being a single-use item, these vapes mostly contain rechargable battery cells of type 18650. Even though they are probably rather cheap and low quality cells, they still have around 2300 mAh at 3.6 V current. This gives us 8250 mWh per cell. One million of them would be 8250 kWh, enough for 100-200 electric cars. Every day. In a full year that's 3011250 kWh or around 3 gigawatt hours of storage capacity.
3 gigawatt hours is the capacity of the number 1 biggest battery-based energy storage system in the world: https://www.energy-storage.news/moss-landing-worlds-biggest-battery-storage-project-is-now-3gwh-capacity/
Tossed in the trash. Only from single use vapes. Every year. And only in the UK.
I hope there's no major flaw in my calculation but if it's not, that's really a crazy figure.
These batteries are free! You can just take them!
Related
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/11/disposable-vapes-from-a-music-festival-can-power-a-beefy-e-bike-20-miles/