As a regular enjoyer of vaping (used to be a pack a day smoker), this is great news. Fuck disposable vapes because theirs nothing "disposable" about them. Plastic, electronics, metals, and lithium batteries that people just fucking throw out their car windows like cigarette butts. That shit is gonna last for thousands of years. And y'all have seen those videos of people's phones and vapes exploding in their pockets when there's a puncture in the battery, right? Yeah let's just throw that shit into landfills and out of car windows and find out what happens.
In 2022, they found more than 40 tonnes of lithium from single-use vapes was discarded, which is the same amount used to power 5,000 electric vehicles.
oh, there's fields and fields of entire cars just sitting in all inhabited remote places. it's becoming a real problem in Alaska. there's towns there literally getting buried in dead cars because it's too expensive to take them anywhere else.
generally if you think "i wonder if this type of thing is getting disposed of properly or if it's a huge ecological problem" the answer is always the latter. the humans in charge don't care about the environment. that's not profitable.
Also the cells are typically in pretty good condition, as the vape tends to run out of the flavoured/nicotine liquid stuff before the battery gets down to a state of charge that is bad for long term storage.
Suicide drones use them too. Best energy density at the required power levels. (Zinc-air batteries are slightly better but you can't extract the energy in minutes.)