Would recycling disposable vapes make us richer?
We’re told that there’s an environmental outrage going on out there:
Thirteen vapes are thrown away every second in the UK – more than a million a day – leading to an “environmental nightmare”, according to research.
There has also been a rise in “big puff” vapes which are bigger and can hold up to 6,000 puffs per vape, with single use vapes averaging 600. Three million of these larger vapes are being bought every week according to the research, commissioned by Material Focus, and conducted by Opinium. 8.2 million vapes are now thrown away or recycled incorrectly every week.
Oh. Gosh.
Material Focus has calculated that the number of vapes thrown away per annum could instead be powering 10,127 electric vehicles.
Our word. That’s the lithium in the vape batteries that could, instead, be used in car batteries.
As we once calculated the Earth’s endowment of lithium is 2,850,000 billion tonnes. With a B. So we’ve no hard shortage of the right type of atoms. It becomes purely a financial consideration therefore.
To a suitable level of accuracy a car battery - an EV - requires about 10 kg of lithium. So, we’re talking 100 tonnes of lithium (10,000 x 10 / 1,000) and each tonne has a cost of about £8,000 for virgin material. We’ve an £800k problem. We’ve also got that 8.2 million a week number, x 52, call that 400 million a year of these disposable vapes - round numbers because don’t be silly about accuracy here.
0.2 pence of lithium per vape therefore. That’s 0.2 pence which has already been paid by the purchaser of the disposable vape of course. The costs are covered already.
But, say, OK, that’s a valuable natural resource that should be recycled. Hmm. Minimum wage in today’s UK is £12 an hour now, close enough. 20 pence a minute or 0.33 pence per second. If that recycling takes more than one second of human time then it’s loss making for us all as a society. Effort, human labour, is being used on something that produces less value than the labour being expended upon it.
There is a little part of this we’re not sure of. We have a feeling that - but don’t know - the recycling process requires moving to “black mass” which then has to be processed as a lithium concentrate, not as lithium. This would move the value of the Li contained another decimal place out - 0.02 pence per vape.
Note that we’re entirely leaving out any transport costs to a factory to do the recycling, the recycling process itself. The process is societally impoverishing if even one second - or, perhaps, one tenth of one second - of human labour has to be expended upon the process.
We’re all in favour of recycling. One of us once recycled a few lorry loads of Soviet nuclear power station scrap into go faster, magalloy, wheels for the cars of boy racers. Made a considerable - house purchase level - profit out of doing so, the profit, the value add, being the proof that the process was societally enriching. Value was being added by the process, see?
Recycling when value is being added is a great idea. Recycling that does not add value is not a great idea.
This idea that disposable vapes should be recycled is societally impoverishing. Therefore we shouldn’t do it.
Of course, no one is actually promoting this idea as a result of having gone through the numbers. Nor is the point to make society richer. It’s a combination of the pecksniffs and the puritans. The pecksniffs are horrified at the idea that anyone might enjoy themselves and the puritans want to enforce worship of the new state religion, that altar to Gaia.
Being forced to make ourselves poorer in order to accommodate the religious desires of others? The only correct response is “Gerroffoutofit”. After all, we did - finally - decide a few hundreds years back that religion, on these silver girt and sceptered isles, was a private, not public, matter.
Tim Worstall