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And now for something completely different… A creative YouTuber recently picked up a whole bunch of discarded single-use (disposable) vapes at a music festival, disassembled them, and then used their battery cells to build a functional e-bike battery pack.
As lithium-ion batteries get smaller and cheaper, their inclusion into more “disposable” consumer products is becoming an issue — you’re not supposed to just chuck them in the trash like alkaline batteries and hope for the best — and some items, like single-use vaping devices, are being disposed of on a large scale these days. Gratefully, there are people like Chris Doel out there, who made a point about the wastefulness of these disposable products by harvesting their guts and putting them back to work.
According to a detailed post about the vape-machine on Ars Technica, Chris Doel’s jerry-rigged homebrewed e-bike battery is “proof” that “Most one-use vape batteries are actually rechargeable.”
“Disposable vapes are indefensible. Many, or maybe most, of them contain rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, but manufacturers prefer to sell new ones. More than 260 million vape batteries are estimated to enter the trash stream every year in the UK alone. Vapers and vape makers are simply leaving an e-waste epidemic to the planet’s future residents to sort out.
“To make a point about how wasteful this practice is—and to also make a pretty rad project and video—Chris Doel took 130 disposable vape batteries (the bigger “3,500 puff” types with model 20400 cells) found littered at a music festival and converted them into a 48-volt, 1,500-watt e-bike battery, one that powered an e-bike with almost no pedaling more than 20 miles.”
In the comments on a reddit post to a battery subreddit, Doel states:
“Turns out disposable vapes have fully rechargeable batteries in them (even though they’re thrown away after one use!). So I collected 130 of them and extracted their cells to build a 48V 15Ah e-bike battery. It only cost me about £60 in parts as well!
“The cells used in these videos were 20400s and were 1.5Ah each, which is really impressive given that they’re free.”
The YouTube video of this vape-to-e-bike project isn’t embeddable, but can be viewed here, where it’s racked up almost 900K views so far. And if you’re into other DIY/recycling/repurposing of potential e-waste projects, be sure to catch his earlier video about using 35 disposable vape batteries to create a fast charging power bank “that can even charge laptops.”
What does this mean for the future of micromobility? More effective vape battery recycling will speed up the transition of transportation from molecules to electrons? Maybe maybe maybe? On a very tiny scale? Ars Technica also informs us that, “US PIRG suggests the lithium contained in each year’s wasted vapes in the US is about 23.6 tons, or enough for 2,600 electric vehicles.” Hmm… I can almost smell the launch of a vape battery recycling startup in the air. Or is it a “smart” vape battery-swapping station? A vape-sharing app? A vape-to-pack EV skateboard manufacturer? The sky’s the limit…
Featured image: Screenshot from YouTube
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