We humans are an inherently wasteful species, and nowhere is this more evident than today. Everything from single-use plastics to disposable electronics are a living testament to this. The sad reality is that a lot of us simply don’t care about how our actions affect the planet, not just for now, but for future generations, too.
We don’t really need to look at the bigger picture, either. The smallest things we do can have a profound effect on the world around us. Take, for example, vapes. I’m sure a lot of you own and use a vape on a regular basis. You see, e-waste is a thing, and the e-waste brought about by disposable vapes seems more than enough to outdo any supposed good they bring to the table.
This was brought to light in an incredibly eye-opening way by UK-based YouTuber and Electrical Engineer Chris Doel when he gathered hundreds of discarded vapes at a music festival and transformed them into something very valuable, something people would pay hundreds of dollars for.
More often than not, the most expensive component in any small electric mobility device is its battery. Spare lithium-ion batteries for e-bikes can set you back hundreds of dollars. But as Chris Doel demonstrates, a look inside reveals that most if not all lithium-ion e-bike batteries are made of the same stuff found inside disposable vapes.
Of course, the logical thing to do here was to put his electrical engineering skills to the test and create his very own e-bike battery out of the discarded vapes. And this is exactly what he did. You can check out the video, and all the creative thinking that went into building the homemade e-bike battery by clicking here.
Chris quickly went to work dismantling every vape and plucking out its battery. He then made use of 3D-printed battery modules to hold the individual cells, and began wiring them together in series, essentially transforming the individual battery cells into one gigantic 48-volt battery.
The technical side of this is very, well, technical, but Chris does a really good job of making it easy to swallow for non-electrically minded folks. But the biggest point here is that he was essentially able to make a high-capacity, high-performance e-bike battery out of literal garbage. All he had to purchase was the 3D-printed modules and battery case, as well as the battery management system—a fraction of what he would’ve otherwise spent if he had bought a brand-new battery.
Talk about turning trash into treasure.
After building his homemade battery, he quickly slapped it onto his e-bike, and managed to cover 33 kilometers all without any pedaling whatsoever. Not bad, and actually at par with a lot of the more affordable ready-made e-bikes on the market today. If he were to use it on pedal assist mode, there’s a good chance he could’ve gone twice the distance, too.
Now, the point of this whole project was clearly to prove a point. There’s so much more to the stuff we treat as garbage, to the point that the whole system is severely flawed. Vape manufacturers intentionally stuff rechargeable batteries into their products without allowing users to charge them, and instead dispose of them while still having a lot of service life left in them.
The batteries used in Chris’ homemade battery pack are rated for around 300 recharge cycles, but the Vape manufacturers that use them only allow you to use them for one.
It took around 130 vapes for Chris to build this e-bike battery for next to nothing. And he explains that around 260 million disposable vapes are thrown away every single year in the UK alone. That translates to around 2,000,000 e-bike batteries, if Chris’ formula were to be followed. So yeah, there’s no shortage of raw materials for making batteries. It’s all just being used for the wrong stuff.
And it isn’t just the batteries that are wasted here, either. Chris points out that a lot of the vape cases are actually made of aluminum, and can be collected and sent over for recycling. Instead, people are leaving them discarded on the floor of clubs, bars, and music festivals. Heck, I wouldn’t be surprised if you could actually make a whole bicycle frame out of all the vapes Chris managed to collect.
So yeah, it’s crazy to see how some companies have the audacity to be so wasteful. But that’s largely because they know they can make a buck off of consumers who wouldn’t think twice about throwing away something that’s still very much useful.
So at the end of the day, it’s on us to change the way things work. I’m not saying that you should go out there and aim for a zero-waste lifestyle. This simply isn’t possible for a lot of us. But being more mindful and deliberate, and doing our research on the stuff we buy, will certainly go a long way.
