Close All Tabs - 'Twitter on a Vape' and The Great E-Waste Crisis

Episode Date: March 11, 2026

A legal loophole has led to a surge in single-use vapes packed with a surprising amount of electronic components. It’s also a glimpse into how our disposable tech habits are fueling a growing e-waste problem. In this episode, tech reporter Samatha Cole shares what happened when she tried to “vape the internet” after seeing a viral post about a disposable touchscreen vape with built-in social media. We also hear from environmental philosopher and public health researcher Yogi Hale Hendlin, who explains how flavored vape bans have led to the flood of high-tech disposables — and how tackling the e-waste crisis will take a radical rethink of our relationship with the products we consume. This episode first aired on April 16th, 2025  Guests: Samantha Cole, reporter and co-founder of 404 Media Yogi Hale Hendlin, environmental philosopher and assistant professor at Erasmus University Further Reading: I Tried to Vape the Internet – Samantha Cole, 404 Media  Communities can't recycle or trash disposable e-cigarettes. So what happens to them? – Matthew Perrone, Associated Press How ‘Sour Raspberry Gummy Bear’ — and Other Chinese Vapes — Made Fools of American Lawmakers –  Marc Novicoff, Politico  The right to repair electronics is now law in 3 states. Is Big Tech complying? – Maddie Stone, Grist   Disposable vapes thrown away quadruples to 5 M per week – Material Focus Read the transcript here Email us at ⁠[e-mail]⁠ Follow us on⁠ ⁠Instagram⁠⁠ and⁠ ⁠TikTok⁠⁠ Credits: Close All Tabs is hosted by Morgan Sung. Our team includes producer Maya Cueva, editor Chris Hambrick and senior editor Chris Egusa who also composed our theme song and credits music.  Additional music from APM. Audio engineering by Brendan Willard. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Jen Chien is our Director of Podcasts. Katie Sprenger is our Director of Content Operations. Ethan Toven-Lindsey is our Editor in Chief. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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shop new arrivals first, and more. Plus, buy online and pick up at your favorite rack store for free. Great brands, great prices. That's why you rack. From KQED. Hi, you're listening to Close All Tabs. I'm Morgan Sung. About a year ago,

we aired an episode about the great vape e-waste crisis. You know those disposable little bricks that let you puff nicotine clouds that taste like icy candy? Well, so-called disposable vapes have gotten pretty advanced and are increasingly actually complex electronic devices. Some even have LED screens. Yeah, you can play games on your vape now. And while they could be recycled, more often than not, they're tossed in the trash. California actually proposed a ban on the sale and distribution of disposable nicotine vapes by 2020.

The bill passed the assembly and is now in the state senate. Since releasing that episode, we've been thinking about our own relationship with disposable culture and how it's changing. Specifically, we've been keeping tabs on the right to repair movement. This idea that if you buy something, you should be allowed to maintain it, repair it, and even modify it, instead of just replacing it. We're digging into this movement in the next two episodes. But first, here's a refresher on the story that sparked our interest. in the right to repair in the first place. Today, we're re-airing Twitter on a vape.

I have never been a smoker, period. I have never smoked nicotine of any kind of such a loser. Sam Cole is a tech journalist and co-founder of 404 Media. And in the summer of 2024, she tried to vape the Internet. There was this tweet going super viral back in July. It was a guy that was like, no way we got Twitter on my vape. And it was a photo of him holding a vape with like Twitter on it, reading tweets on it. It was exactly what it sounds like, a little flip phone size, disposable vape with a digital screen.

And everyone was freaking out about it. It became a meme format. Like there was one where someone was putting Zillow on a vape. In other posts, people were getting breaking news alerts on their vapes or playing games like Tetris and 2048. And Sam, being an intrepid journalist, was determined to figure out if it was real. Yeah. I'm always looking for new ways to ingest the internet. So I was like, let me look in the comments or in the replies and see if anybody actually has it.

And it turned out someone did have a link. God bless the internet. A lot of them were sold out. The other flavors were fucking fab. I wish I knew what fucking fab tasted like. Juicy peach, obviously you can imagine. violent rainbow was also sold out. I'm sure it was disgusting, but watermelon ice was like the only one left.

Sam lives in New York, but was staying in California for a few weeks, so she bought the watermelon ice smart babe and shipped it to her friend's house in Los Angeles. This is relevant. I was like, first of all, I can't believe this goes through the mail. This definitely seems like something that should it between the battery and the vape juice and everything else and the electronics involved. I was like house sitting. and I was like, I hope this isn't a catchfire while I'm not at home.

It looks like a phone. It was like a pink, like a light pink square, kind of like a deck of cards almost. It had a touchscreen that wasn't like as janky as I expected a vape touchscreen to be. Okay, so the vape looked like a phone, but it didn't really function as one. It couldn't connect to the internet by itself. Sam actually had to download a separate app and connect. to the vape via Bluetooth and then authorize different apps to send notifications to the vape. Once you connected it to your phone, it would start getting push notifications from whatever

apps that you set up to connect to the vape. So that's where the Twitter on the vape came from. There was a calculator in case you need to do math while you're vaping. And it also had a step tracker and a weather app and a few games. But a lot of the apps didn't really work unless Sam's phone was nearby. She said she couldn't actually browse the internet on her vape, but because she was getting notifications on it, it created this cycle of getting pinged while puffing some watermelon ice and then checking her phone and then puffing again. I mean, I was very quickly, like, literally addicted to this thing because it was nicotine. I was bringing it everywhere. I was like, it was like a fun thing to show people because obviously it's like weird and kooky. I had it out like

drinking and then I was vaping. I was like, man, this is, I need to put this away. I need to put it in a drawer and not think about it. And then it was just like calling me like the green goblin mask. Coward, we have a new world to conquer. It was like, I need a little, I need a little watermelon eyes. So Sam wrote up this tongue-in-cheek blog post for 404 media about trying to vape the internet, but after publishing it, she still found herself reaching for the vape. So I was like, this is like the dumbest blog I've ever written. It's up there on like the dumbest ways to get addicted to vaping is the stunt where I'm trying to read Twitter on a vape. Yeah, it's like you're addicted to the nicotine and you're addicted to your feed.

Right. Yeah, I was addicted to all of it at the same time, which is just so dark. connecting this very like neurochemical process of like being addicted to nicotine and then getting like DMs on the vape and being like, ooh, who's dam on Twitter? This is like such a dark path to go down. Sam ended up kicking the habit when she left the vape at her friend's house in L.A. She said she was scared to take it through airport security. And when she got back to New York, she resisted the temptation to buy another one. Since then, she's managed to keep her nicotine consumption limited to the very occasional analog cigarette shared among friends. But Sam said that her vape experience was an eye-opener in more ways than one.

There was her brush with this combined nicotine and internet addiction, sure. But she's also been thinking about another issue. Just how wasteful these vapes are. Remember, they're disposable. There's no vape pot to swap out if you want to change flavors. You can't refill it once it's empty. and a lot of them aren't even rechargeable. You can easily go through one in a few weeks,

or a few days if you're really puffing, which means that you're constantly replacing them. There was a time in, like, New York slash Bushwick, surely you recall this, but just the ground was just covered in used jewel pods. It was just everywhere. At the time, I was like, this is an ecological disaster. And now I think everywhere. Yeah.

And it's discussed everywhere. And, like, you know, it's like, I guess the equivalent of, like, cigarette butts, except they don't degrade or anything. But then this, I was like, okay, when I finish this vape, I can't refill it, even though it has all this stuff in it. Like, it has, like, the touchscreen. Like, it has chips inside of it. It has a battery inside of it, obviously. Lots of plastic. So I was like, damn, there's a lot of, like, engineering that goes into this thing.

And then it becomes disposable within, like, a couple weeks. Okay. So what exactly makes vapes an ecological? disaster, like Sam said. Are you supposed to recycle them? And how big of a problem is this really? That's what we're getting into today. This is close all tabs. I'm Morgan Sung, tech journalist, and your chronically online friend here to open as many browser tabs as it takes to help you understand how the digital world affects our real lives. Let's get into it. E-waste or electronic waste includes any electronic device that's thrown away instead of recycled. It's copper wires,

semiconductors, circuit boards, LED screens, heavy metals, batteries, and more. It's the stuff in our refrigerators and our old iPhones and in our vapes. When these materials are dumped in landfills, they don't really break down. And the sheer rate at which people are now buying, puffing, and then tossing disposable vapes is rapidly adding to the e-waste crisis. Let's make that our first tab. Disposable vapes and e-waste. To explain how disposable vapes became so popular, let me take you back in time. To the year 2019.

This was the first ever Hot Girl Summer, as coined by Megan the Stallion, and Mango Jewel Pods were everywhere. It was a simpler time. And then, fear of popcorn lung swept the nation. Popcorn lung is the informal name for a lung condition in which the small airways in your lungs become so inflamed and scarred that breathing becomes extremely difficult. It's from inhaling a chemical called diacetyl, which is used as a buttery flavoring in products like popcorn. It's safe to eat, but when inhaled, it can cause permanent damage. That year, a ton of people, especially teenagers, started to get really sick with mysterious lung issues. A seemingly healthy Texas teenager suddenly unable to breathe and hospitalized with lung failure.

His doctors suspect vaping was the cause. The CDC released some new numbers today. The new numbers show more than 2,000 people now have been diagnosed with a vaping illness. In the United States, there were over 2,700 confirmed cases related to this mysterious vape illness and 68 deaths. One teenager in Canada had symptoms that aligned with popcorn lung, but all of the cases, in the U.S. involves pneumonia and other symptoms that aren't present in popcorn lung. That pointed to another culprit. The CDC actually identified a different chemical as the probable cause of these vape-related cases,

vitamin E acetate. It was used in a lot of black market weed vape cartridges to dilute cannabis oil and essentially make a cheaper product. The CDC never confirmed whether diacetyl, the flavoring chemical, was related. Still, the fear of popcorn lung and the amount of teenagers getting sick contributed to a nationwide crackdown on flavored vapes, whether or not they contained diacetyl. At the time, Jule was the biggest e-cigarette company. They sold different flavor pods like mango, crumbruly, and berry, which were all interchangeable and worked with a rechargeable battery. In 2020, the FDA banned most flavored cartridges, like Jule pods.

ban on the fruit-flavored e-cigarette cartridges, including mint, most popular with teens. And a recent Supreme Court decision cited with the FDA over its flavored vape ban. In a unanimous ruling, the Supreme Court has given the FDA a victory in its ability to regulate e-cigarettes. Okay. I confess that I was once a Jewel Kid. Frankly, the flavor ban made getting a hold of my beloved mango-flavored nicotine so inconvenient that I stopped vaping entirely. But that flavor ban did not apply to disposable bapes.

And in the year since, an entire unregulated gray market opened up, offering more dessert flavors than Jewel ever carried. So to break this down, we're going to hear from someone with expertise in both public health and the environment, Dr. Yogi Hale Hendlin. He's an environmental philosopher who currently teaches at Erasmus University Rotterdam. But when he was a researcher at UC San Francisco during the height of the vape illness crisis, he very closely studied vaping and nicotine habits. And that included keeping tabs on how people were getting rid of their vapes. The FDA banned flavors for refillable, reusable vapes, but not for disposable ones. Because at the time, they weren't a thing, really. Jule was the thing.

They were, you know, 70% of the market. for a while. You can hold them accountable, at least. But when you get this disposable vape market, taking this loophole and exploiting it as much as they can for the thousands and thousands of flavors, guess which market is most interested in flavors? It's not 80-year-old smokers looking to quit. It's kids and young adults, and the industry knows this. The FDA has had years to close this loophole, to do something about it because it's really all about flavors. So flavors is driving the disposable vaves. For a while, it seems like smoking was really falling out of popularity.

I mean, cigarettes were really out, at least in the United States. But now it seems like vaping is more popular. What impact is this having on the environment? If we look at these devices, they're not being recycled. They're not being built for long time use, but to last as long as, necessary for a disposable vape and then thrown out. And that's accumulating in our dumps, in our incinerators. A 2023 report commissioned by the United Nations found that 844 million vapes are thrown away every year. That is enough lithium to make batteries for 5,000 electric cars.

Lithium is already a finite resource, and mining it involves significant water consumption and deforestation. Even though lithium itself isn't renewable, batteries, that contain it can be rechargeable or can be repurposed. But single-use vapes aren't always meant to be taken apart or recycled. So these lithium batteries are usually just discarded. So this is really quite alarming that we're allocating our resources towards continued addiction by other means and at the same time junking the planet. Right. Can you talk about why disposables are so popular, whether for e-cigarettes or even for weed vapes, which, you know, weed-vap cartridges aren't banned the same way that, you know, a mango jewel pod is.

But people do gravitate toward disposables anyway. Well, right now they're making them so cheap. We're not reflecting the true cost of these items in our economy. We're basically subsidizing the waste at the end of life. You know, there's no extended producer responsibility where the manufacturer has to be responsible for it. There's no sort of brand loyalty where you have to make sure that your device works properly for a certain amount of time. Right now, it is really a race to the bottom in terms of how much can you pack into this single thing than you throw away. It makes it much easier for

students who, you know, they can flush it down the toilet if it's about to get confiscated, which unfortunately happens way too much. And it's, you know, it's. something that they can pass around. Are you familiar with those very advanced, like, vapes with screens on them that can connect to your smartphone, they have games, some of them have step trackers. Have you seen these? Absolutely. Yeah, they are the logical progression of, you know, tracking multiple addictions all on one device. Right. And what is astonishing to me is that, yeah, these aren't refillable. You're not going to buy, like, you know, nicotine juice at a vape shop.

and refill it, you're just going to use it and then get rid of it. Yeah, there's no way to even refill it if you'd want to. You know, you'd probably like break the thing. But these things have LED screens. They have like, you know, they're like basically old school game boys. I mean, can you speak about like how this trends of super advanced gamified vapes exacerbates the waste issue? I'm just going to take a step back to the problem of disposables, right? So, you know, before you would finish your juice and you'd get a refill, and you'd do that with the same device for, you know, a year or two or three.

But now you have like this whole unit, this thing that has the battery that has the now these screens, but all this circuitry too, the heating component. And you're throwing that all away as soon as the juice is gone. Sometimes they integrate with your smartphone, but they also have like GPS tracking, social media notification. Like you said, fitness tracking and built-in-game. So it's like increasing the association of entertainment and sort of the practicality and weaves in like seamlessly with the rest of your life. And I think that this sort of integration is the dream of any product manufacturer. But when you do it with something that's so addictive and isn't good for you, you know,

that this raises a host. of like moral problems and, you know, societal ones. I also wanted to clarify the difference between what goes into a disposable vape and what goes into a rechargeable vape battery. Obviously, with a 10,000 hit, non-rechargeable disposable vape, you need a bigger battery to compensate for all of those hits, right, to get the heating coil to work. So you're actually using a bigger battery in a disposable than you would. and your standard rechargeable, like a jewel.

But you're only using the battery once. Rather than renewing it, like, you know, 100 or a thousand times, you're using that battery once. None of these are really being made in the U.S. anyhow. So there's also questions about, you know, safety for health, safety for the environment. And, yeah, it's a wild west right now. What happens when a vape is, you know, dropped in the environment? Like, what happens to the environment? How does it break down?

So, I mean, the lithium batteries oftentimes, you know, in dumpsters, you get dumpster fires if the thing gets impacted. You know, a chemical fire is not so easy to put out either. Sometimes you just have to let it burn out. What happens, you know, when it's on the curb, ultimately it probably goes into our storm drains and probably leeches a lot of particulate matter, you know, heavy metals into our water stream that goes out to the ocean. ultimately. Oh, great. So we're turning the ocean into a giant like vape juice container. Totally. With the lithium ion batteries and all the like soldering components that are usually made with mercury, it's no bueno. According to CDC data released last year, Americans threw away 5.7 disposable vapes per second in 2023. Roughly 500,000 every day in the U.S. alone.

Trying to regulate the disposable vape market is like playing a game of whack-a-mole. Nearly all of them are manufactured in China, which ironically also bans flavored e-cigarettes. But it doesn't ban the export of vapes, which is how the U.S. became flooded with cotton-candy flavored disposables after 2020. There's really nothing stopping retailers from selling them, despite attempts from local lawmakers. The FDA keeps trying to crack down on them and has seized 10,000. of millions of dollars worth of illegal vape shipments. But new companies pop up and find more loopholes

or just sell them on the black market. And although the Trump administration's tariffs have put a dent in the disposable vape supply, there's no national standard for actually recycling these things. That also means that trash is piling up. So if it isn't the FDA, is anyone regulating the disposal of these things? We'll talk about that after this break. Support for a key QBD podcast comes from Xfinity. Thanks to the Xfinity five-year price guarantee, your guaranteed five years of reliable Wi-Fi with our best equipment, no annual contracts, and no fees.

Plus, get online in minutes with same-day Wi-Fi. Lock in your price and unlock the possibilities. Xfinity, imagine that. Restrictions apply. Select plans only. Girl, winter is so last season. And now Springs got you looking at pictures of tank tops with hungry eyes. Your algorithm is feeding you cutoffs. You're thirsty for the sun on your

shoulders. That perfect hang on the patio sundress. Those sandals you can wear all day and all night. And you've had enough of shopping from your couch. Done hoping it looks anything like the picture when you tear open that envelope. It's time for a little in-person spring treat. It's time for a trip to Ross. Work your magic. California has some of the strictest e-waste laws in the country. But when it comes to nicotine vapes, disposal guidelines are fuzzy. New tab. California vape laws. So in California, it's actually illegal to throw away a lot of electronics,

from old computers to TVs to even weed pens. They have to be disposed of at special facilities. As of 2024, cannabis companies aren't allowed to market their vapes as disposable. And a lot of dispensaries have started taking back used vapes to safely get rid of them. In fact, there is a whole cottage industry of cannabis waste companies that collect used vapes from dispensaries. Then, they separate the batteries and cartridges to recycle them. Not all of it is recyclable, and it's not a perfect system, but it's a start. It helps that THC products in California are pretty vigorously regulated, so weed vapes have to be made to a certain standard.

The same system doesn't really exist for those disposable flavored nicotine vapes. and local recycling programs often refuse to take them. One of the major conundrums that keeps these things from being more recyclable than they are currently, is that vapes are currently treated as both hazardous waste because of the nicotine and electronic waste, right? So you basically have this thing that you can't just put in electronic waste and deal with it because it has nicotine. And so you can't really have a circular economy, with the way that the laws are currently set up. A circular economy is an economy where the products that you're using

are made to be disassembled, refurbished, reassembled, sort of reappropriated into new products with minimum energy use, minimum waste. In California, I believe that our laws are still preventing us from fully being able to recycle these things. Currently, they're not made to spec so that we can all say, okay, so this is how you take it apart and easily get the valuable metals, take the battery out. They're not modular. Yeah.

I mean, I didn't know about the vape disposal law until I started reporting on this story. And a lot of people I've talked to you also just did not know about this law. As a public health expert, is there anything California should be doing to get the message out about vape recycling? We need to make it easy as pie. And this is how we do it. You put a deposit on the vape. You say, hey, you want to buy a vape? Great.

Here is $5 deposit that you pay when you buy it. When you deposit your vape to be recycled, you get your five bucks back. And everybody, especially those who are in need of money, especially those who are young, are going to proper. deal with their vape. It's called the deposit return system. It's been used for milk bottles for over a century. It's also in California on our computers. So California lawmakers also introduced a bill that wants to ban disposable vapes entirely. Some are concerned that banning disposable vapes entirely will push people to buy it from the black market instead. What do you think of this? Is this just fearmongering from like the big vaping industry? Yes, it is.

I mean, we've heard for a long time from the tobacco industry that, you know, if you tax cigarettes, the black market will be the place where people get their cigarettes. Most kids are not getting their things from the black market. So it's an idea of proportionality. It's not that those arguments are absolutely incorrect. It's just that they overplay their hand, right? if we want to protect kids and young adults from these devices, if we want to get rid of the environmental harms, which are so considerable of single-use vapes, then all you have to do is ban single-use vapes, and then they're not going to become the cool thing anymore.

And so that's not what people will be using, and the overtone window will shift, and consumer preferences will change. And so the black market issue for me is sort of a non-starter if you think it logically all the way through. Right. I mean, again, going back to my 21-year-old little jewel-addicted brain, I stopped jeweling because it became inconvenient to buy jewels. Like, is it that simple, really? It really is that simple. You know, if we make access a little bit more difficult, and a deposit is a great way to do that. or an addictive drug that harms the environment, you can easily put a deposit on it

and it makes it a little bit less accessible for kids. And it also makes sure that people who do use these devices, that they return them where they're supposed to go. There was a recent study showing that somewhere between 70 and 80% of all vapes are improperly disposed of. Where are they going? They're going in our waterways. I have a whole collection that I found,

on the streets of San Francisco. Not that people are always just discarding them, but people also lose them. They fall out of backpacks. So there's a lot of carelessness because they're so cheap and disposable and because there's no accountability. If this ban passes,

will moving to rechargeable vapes actually do anything for the environment or will people just keep treating their rechargeable vapes like their disposable and keep losing them and keep easily tossing them without actually recycling them, just paying more for it. Obviously, just moving to reusable versus disposable

is not going to solve the whole issue. I think we still need a deposit because there's still going to be an end-of-life issue if we want to make sure that we get those in the proper place. We also need accessibility. We need it to make it easy for people like, you go to your supermarket and there's a bin. And you go to the grocer and you give your device,

you get your five bucks back, and it's over. So we need to integrate it into our recycling infrastructure. And, yeah, there's going to be a lag time, right? Just as every generation has to learn new technologies, you know, people are going to have to get used to moving from disposable to non-disposable, just as they also did move from reusable to disposable. That was also a learning curve. With the current administration, the likelihood of further

federal regulation on disposable vapes is unclear. Despite spearheading the flavored vape ban in 2019, Trump has backtracked. He since promised to, quote, save vaping. He made it one of the hallmarks of his 2024 campaign, with business insider reporting that some conservative circles have embraced nicotine consumption as masculine and contrarian. Just this week, the FDA released a document that said it would consider allowing some flavored vape options, like coffee, or tea or mint, while continuing to ban fruity, sweet flavors that appeal to teenagers. But the FDA didn't say anything about disposables specifically. Look, we can regulate vapes until we're blue in the face, but to meaningfully reduce

vape waste, we need a culture-wide shift in how we consume tech products. The current state of vape prohibition hasn't stopped people from buying flavored vapes, or curved e-waste. That's by some DIY enthusiasts have actually taken it upon themselves. to prove that disposable vapes can be recycled. Okay, let's do one more tab. The Circular Economy and the Right to Repair. Last month, this YouTuber who goes by Nekomichi went super viral

after someone dumped a single-use vape on their doorstep. Instead of tossing it, Nekomichi broke open the plastic casing, pried the lithium battery out, and wired it to an old iPod touch. They actually managed to power the iPod, using the vape battery. Nekomichi is one of many DIYers who salvage batteries and other parts from so-called disposable vapes and repurpose them for power banks, gaming controllers, and other small devices.

One person on the DIY electronic subreddit even built an e-bike battery out of 130 disposable vapes. That is a great reuse of these batteries that otherwise would just end up in our landfills or incinerated. at the same time, you can't expect your average vapor to know know how to use Arduino chips and, you know, be able to do this. I think it's a great proof of concept, right? It shows these things are totally reusable. Like, it's insane that we're just throwing them out after, you know, a single run. We also have to be aware, however, that because the batteries are not made to last, that there are lots of possible hazards that could come from that.

Like Yogi pointed out, DIY recycling is not exactly going to solve a massive systemic issue. Taking apart and then repurposing BAPE components is extremely labor intensive, requires highly technical skills, and may cause a fire that's nearly impossible to put out. But what is inching us closer to building the circular economy that Yogi was talking about earlier is the right to repair movement. Under right to repair laws, now in place in at least seven states, if you buy a new electronic device, the company that sold you that device has to sell the repair manuals and spare parts to fix it if it breaks, instead of forcing you to buy a whole new one. In addition to taking back used cartridges and batteries for recycling, some cannabis vape companies

also sell replacement parts and offer repair services. This might be a way forward for more sustainable e-cigarettes too. It's like, I don't want to be in disposable relationships. I like having my old cell phone that works exactly the way I like it to, and I don't have to use a month of my time figuring out like the new configurations on a new one and getting them exactly I would like, you know, I like stuff that lasts a while so that I can get cozy with it, that I can get to know it. I mean, people will always be determined to get their nicotine fix. So when addressing this e-waste issue and having that in mind, is there any sustainable way forward, do you think? Like, is the answer just to go back to cigarettes?

No, I don't think so. But, you know, at the birth of the e-cigarette movement, there were a lot of these mods, they called them, right? So it was sort of- Mapleords. Yeah, exactly, right? So build your own e-cigret. And it really did have a lot of that maker's sort of ethos behind it, where you could optimize, you know, the liquid, the juice and the battery and the heating coil, get the right oms so that everything's perfect and you can blow these amazing clouds, right? So I do think that we can help raise awareness of, you know, making things more sustainable in terms of reusable.

Number one, by taking off the market, you know, the option just to, like, be totally mindless about it. And hopefully all of this is in tandem with raising awareness of the long-term effects of vaping as well. Because, you know, people need their nicotine fix. Like, they're going to get it. But there are so many better ways to do so. than with disposables. Okay, so here's what you're supposed to do when you're ready to throw away a vape. Don't toss them in your regular trash or rinse them out.

We don't want those chemicals hitting municipal water systems. Treat it like getting rid of batteries. Put it aside in a cool, dry place until you can drop it off at a household hazardous waste disposal spot. You can look up your local site online, contact your waste management company, or ask at the place where you bought the vape. And maybe consider leaving disposable vapes behind. You know, I really understand that we are social animals. You know, we are mammals that mimic each other.

And so when we are in situations where it's just easy, out of sight, out of mind, hey, that's really convenient for us. But when we're forced to understand, okay, so maybe you had to blow up a mountain to get the lithium to, like, make that vape. maybe you had to deforest lots of land in Malawi and have people who got green leaf sickness from harvesting the tobacco leaves and then you had to flu cure them and extract the nicotine and make that's how I got my thing like you become a lot more aware and you treat it in a more sacred way because you know I'm not saying that you know people shouldn't do X or Y but when we're aware of the full ramifications of what we're doing, the whole commodity chain, the global commodity

chains that make it super simple just to press a few buttons on the internet, have this thing delivered to me, I suck on it, I throw it in the garbage can, it goes away, and that's it. That's my entire relationship to it. That makes it all too easy for me to totally bypass the actual impacts that is having on people and the environment. And that being said, definitely do not flush your vapes down the toilet. For now, let's close these tabs. Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios and is reported and hosted by me, Morgan Sung. Our producer is Maya Kweva.

Chris Hambrick is our editor. Chris Agusa is our senior editor and wrote our theme song and credits music. Additional music by APM. Brendan Willard is our audio engineer. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Springer is our director of content operations. Jen Cheyenne is our director of podcasts, and Ethan Tovin-Lin-Linsey is our editor-in-chief. Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild,

American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco, Northern California, local. Keyboard sounds were recorded on my purple and pink dust-silver K-84 wired mechanical keyboard with Gator on red switches. If you have feedback or a topic you think we should cover, hit us up at close all tabs at kkwed.org. Follow us on Instagram at Close All Taps Pod or drop it in Discord. We're in the Close All Taps channel at Discord.g.g. slash KQED. And if you're enjoying the show, give us a reading on Apple Podcasts or whatever platform you use.

Thanks for listening. I wish this thing had like a little Tomogachi on it so then I could like. Oh my God, yeah. Care for my little pet and then also be baby-fay. Don't give them ideas. I bet that exists. Support for KKUBD Podcast comes from Xfinity. Thanks to the Xfinity five-year price.

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