#ban disposable vapes

[newsbites]

Australian Minister for Health, Mark Butler has called out the vaping industry in remarks detailing the action which will be taken by the Albanese government to protect Australians from harm caused by e-cigarettes.

[training4theapocalypse]

[urbanchats]

Vaping: Australia will prohibit the import of disposable vapes starting from January

Australia to ban disposable vape imports to Safeguard Youth Health Australia recently introduced stringent measures to combat the escalating issue of youth nicotine addiction. The country has announced a ban on the import of disposable vapes, scheduled to begin in January. These legislative steps are part of a comprehensive strategy to eradicate recreational vaping and address the rising concern…

[ur-mag]

Disposable vapes set to be banned to protect children | In Trend Today

Disposable vapes set to be banned to protect children Read Full Text or Full Article on MAG NEWS

[crippled-peeper]

I spent my day filling up a 13 gallon garbage bag with litter I found in my neighborhood and out of all of that trash I picked up 1 (one) single, lone, plastic straw

so obviously we gotta ban straws since they’re the main issue. not the 13 GALLONS of plastic bags, diapers, cups, cans, bottles, “disposable” vape pens, plastic landscaping mats, foam packaging, and snack packaging I picked up today

[l4ndojpg]

the bau’s stances on vaping

because i was once a raging nicotine/drug addict but i’m over a year sober now and this is funny to me

spencer: obviously anti. everytime he sees someone hitting a vape he starts reeling off statistics and ingredients and telling you how bad it is for you.

morgan: has one of those fucking MONSTER chunky vapes and hits it religiously

emily: will buy a fruity mini disposable if she happens to be nearby a shop

penelope: likes the smell but knows it’s bad for you, asks morgan to breathe it in her face

jj: goes so mom mode on emily and morgan when she sees them hitting and tries to dispose of the vapes in secret

rossi: thinks vaping is for pussies and “you should just have a cigar like we did in my day”

hotch: doesn’t try and pry them out of their hands like jj does but has banned vaping on cases because it’s “unprofessional”

bonus:

gideon: “what’s vaping?”

double bonus:

will: asks morgan if he can hit his vape and jj doesn’t talk to him for 2 days

[mariacallous]

A new report by environmental groups lays out a case for banning deep sea mining—and explains why the real solution to humanity’s energy crisis might just be sitting in the trash.

Deep sea mining is the pursuit of rare, valuable minerals that lie undisturbed upon the ocean floor—metals like nickel, cobalt, lithium, and rare earth elements. These so-called critical minerals are instrumental in the manufacture of everything from electric vehicle batteries and MRI machines to laptops and disposable vape cartridges—including, crucially, much of what’s needed to transition away from fossil fuels. Political leaders and the companies eager to dredge up critical minerals from the seafloor tend to focus on the feel-good, climate-friendly uses of the minerals, like EV batteries and solar panels. They’ll proclaim that the metals on the deep seafloor are an abundant resource that could help usher in a new golden age of renewable energy technology.

But deep sea mining has also been roundly criticized by environmentalists and scientists, who caution that the practice (which has not yet kicked off in earnest) could create a uniquely terrible environmental travesty and annihilate one of the most remote and least understood ecosystems on the planet.

There has been a wave of backlash from environmentalists, scientists, and even comedians like John Oliver, who devoted a recent segment of Last Week Tonight to lambasting deep sea mining. Some companies that use these materials in their products—Volvo, Volkswagen, BMW, and Rivian among them—have come out against deep sea mining and pledged not to use any metals that come from those abyssal operations. (Some prominent companies have done the exact opposite; last week, Tesla shareholders voted against a moratorium on using minerals sourced from deep sea mining.)

Even if you can wave away that ecological threat, mining the sea might simply be wholly unnecessary if the goal is to bring about a new era of global renewable energy. A new report, aptly titled “We Don’t Need Deep-Sea Mining,” aims to lay out why.

The report is a collaboration between the advocacy group US PIRG, Environment America Policy Center, and the nonprofit think tank Frontier Group. Nathan Proctor, senior director of the Campaign for the Right to Repair at PIRG and one of the authors of the new report, says the solution to sourcing these materials should be blindingly obvious. There are critical minerals all around us that don’t require diving deep into the sea. You’re probably holding some right now—they’re in nearly all our devices, including the billions of pounds of them sitting in the dump.

The secret to saving the deep sea, Proctor says, is to prioritize systems that focus on the materials we already have—establishing right to repair laws, improving recycling capabilities, and rethinking how we use tech after the end of its useful life cycle. These are all systems we have in place now that don’t require tearing up new lands thousands of feet below the ocean.

“We don't need to mine the deep sea,” Proctor reiterates. “It's about the dumbest way to get these materials. There's way better ways to address the needs for those metals like cobalt, nickel, copper, and the rest.”

Into the Abyss

Schemes for delving into the deep ocean have been on the boards for years. While the practice is not currently underway, mining companies are getting ready to dive in as soon as they can.

In January 2024, the Norwegian Parliament opened up its waters to companies looking to mine resources. The Metals Company is a Canadian mining operation that has been at the forefront of attempts to mine in the Pacific Ocean’s Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ)—an area of seabed that spans 3,100 miles between Mexico and Hawaii.

The proposed mining in the CCZ has gotten the most attention lately because the Metals Company secured rights to access key areas of the CCZ for mining in 2022, and its efforts are ramping up. The process involves gathering critical minerals from small rock-like formations called polymetallic nodules. Billions of these nodules rest along the seabed, seemingly sitting there ripe for the taking (if you can get down to them). The plan—one put forth by several mining companies, anyway—is to scrape the ocean floor with deep sea trawling systems and bring these nodules to the surface, where they can be broken down to extract the shiny special metals inside. Environmentalists say this poses a host of ecological problems for everything that lives in the vicinity.

Gerard Barron, the CEO of the Metals Company, contends that his efforts are misunderstood by activists and the media (especially, say, John Oliver).

“We're committed to circularity,” Barron says. “We have to drive towards circularity. We have to stop extracting from our planet. But the question is, how can you recycle what you don’t have?”

Both Barron and the authors of the activist report acknowledge that there aren’t perfect means of resource extraction anywhere—and there’s always going to be some environmental toll. Barron argues that it is better for this toll to play out in one of the most remote parts of the ocean.

“No matter what, you will be disrupting an ecosystem,” says Kelsey Lamp, ocean campaign director with the Environment America Research and Policy Center and an author of the report. “This is an ecosystem that evolved over millions of years without light, without human noise, and with incredibly clear water. If you disrupt it, the likelihood of it coming back is pretty low.”

For many of the life-forms down in the great deep, the nodules are the ecosystem. Removing the nodules from the seabed would remove all the life attached to them.

“This is a very disruptive process with ecosystems that may never recover,” says Tony Dutzik, associate director and senior policy analyst at the nonprofit think tank Frontier Group and another author of the report. “This is a great wilderness that is linked to the health of the ocean at large and that has wonders that we’re barely even beginning to recognize what they are.”

Barron counters that the life in the abyssal zone is less abundant than in an ecosystem like rainforests in Indonesia, where a great deal of nickel mines operate—although scientists discovered 5,000 new species in the CCZ in 2023 alone. He considers that the lesser of two evils.

“At the end of the day, it's not that easy,” You can't just say no to something. If you say no to this, you're saying yes to something else.”

The Circular Economy

Barron and others make the case that this ecosystem disruption is the only way to access the minerals needed to fuel the clean-tech revolution, and is therefore worth the cost in the long run. But Proctor and the others behind the report aren't convinced. They say that without fully investing in a circular economy that thinks more carefully about the resources we use, we will continue to burn through the minerals needed for renewable tech the same way we've burned through fossil fuels.

“I just had this initial reaction when I heard about deep sea mining,” Proctor says. “Like, ‘Oh, really? You want to strip mine the ocean floor to build electronic devices that manufacturers say we should all throw away?’”

While mining companies may wax poetic about using critical minerals for building clean tech, there's no guarantee that's where the minerals will actually wind up. They are also commonly used in much more consumer-facing devices, like phones, laptops, headphones, and those aforementioned disposable vape cartridges. Many of these devices are not designed to be long lasting, or repairable. In many cases, big companies like Apple and Microsoft have actively lobbied to make repairing their devices more difficult, all but guaranteeing more of them will end up in the landfill.

“I spend every day throwing my hands up in frustration by just how much disposable, unfixable, ridiculous electronics are being shoveled on people with active measures to prevent them from being able to reuse them,” Proctor says. “If these are really critical materials, why are they ending up in stuff that we're told is instantly trash?”

The report aims to position critical minerals in products and e-waste as an “abundant domestic resource.” The way to tap into that is to recommit to the old mantra of reduce, reuse, recycle—with a couple of additions. The report adds the concept of repairing and reimagining products to the list, calling them the five Rs. It calls for making active efforts to extend product lifetimes and invest in “second life” opportunities for tech like solar panels and battery recycling that have reached the end of their useful lifespan. (EV batteries used to be difficult to recycle, but more cutting-edge battery materials can often work just as well as new ones, if you recycle them right.)

Treasures in the Trash

The problem is thinking of these deep sea rocks in the same framework of fossil fuels. What may seem like an abundant resource now is going to feel much more finite later.

“There is a little bit of the irony, right, that we think it's easier to go out and mine and potentially destroy one of the most mysterious remote wildernesses left on this planet just to get more of the metals we're throwing in the trash every day,” Lamp says.

And in the trash is where the resources remain. Electronics manufacturing is growing five times faster than e-waste recycling, so without investment to disassemble those products for their critical bits, all the metals will go to waste. Like deep sea mining, the infrastructure needed to make this a worthwhile path forward will be tremendous, but committing to it means sourcing critical minerals from places nearby, and reducing some waste in the process.

Barron says he isn't convinced these efforts will be enough. “We need to do all of that,” Barron says, “You know, it's not one or the other. We have to do all of that, but what we have to do is slow down destroying those tropical rainforests.” He adds, “If you take a vote against ocean metals, it is a vote for something else. And that something else is what we’ve got right now.”

Proctor argues that commonsense measures, implemented broadly and forcefully across society to further the goal of creating a circular economy, including energy transition minerals, will ultimately reduce the need for all forms of extraction, including land and deep-sea mining.

“We built this system that knows how to do one thing, which is take stuff out of the earth, put it into products and sell them, and then plug our ears and forget that they exist,” Proctor says. “That’s not the reality we live in. The sooner that we can disentangle that kind of paradigm from the way we think about consumption and industrial policy the better, because we're going to kill everybody with that kind of thinking.”

Just like mining the deep sea, investing in a circular economy is not going to be an easy task. There is an allure of deep sea mining when it is presented as a one-stop shop for all the materials needed for the great energy transition. But as the authors of the report contend, the idea of exploiting a vast deposit of resources is the same relationship society has had with fossil fuels—they’re seemingly abundant resources ripe for the picking, but also they are ultimately finite.

“If we treat these things as disposable, as we have, we’re going to need to continually refill that bucket,” Dutzik says. “If we can build an economy in which we’re getting the most out of every bit of what we mine, reusing things when we can, and then recycling the material at the end of their lives, we can get off of that infinite extraction treadmill that we’ve been on for a really long time.”

[xeme-starx]

@definitionoffuckup disposable vapes planned to be banned in UK from June 2025

[michaelgovehateblog]

I actually think the smoking ban is a good thing, it obviously won't entirely stop smoking or underage smoking, at least not for many many years, but making cigarettes less accessible will surely prevent lots of people from even starting smoking in the first place. I dislike giving Tories credit as much as the next person but I don't see anything bad about this or banning disposable vapes

[vapemoon]

CDC and FDA Data Reveals Declining Youth Vaping Rates Despite Increased E-Cig Usage

Recent CDC and FDA surveys indicate declining teen vaping rates even as adult adoption of e-cigarettes rises. The findings counter arguments that vaping acts as a gateway to youth smoking.

Key CDC and FDA Youth Vaping Statistics

The CDC and FDA conduct an annual National Youth Tobacco Survey (NYTS) tracking youth tobacco product usage.

NYTS 2023 found:

High school e-cigarette use fell to 10% from 14% in 2022

580,000 fewer high schoolers reported vaping

Overall teen tobacco product usage dropped from 16.5% to 12.6%

These declining rates occurred alongside rising adult e-cigarette adoption. This contrasts arguments vaping leads youth to smoking.

Youth Cigarette Smoking Also at Historic Lows

Critically, cigarette usage among teens reached historic lows of just 1.6% in 2023.

If vaping acted as a gateway, increased e-cig usage should correlate with more youth smoking. Yet smoking rates stagnated.

CDC and FDA data indicates vaping does not lead to more teen cigarette adoption.

Global Data Paints Similar Picture

A UK study compared countries allowing versus banning e-cigarette sales. Declines in youth smoking rates were faster in places with legal vaping access like the UK.

Conversely, Australia bans nicotine e-cigarettes and saw slower drops in cigarette use compared to vaping-allowed countries.

This further counters the gateway theory, as easy vaping access did not increase youth smoking in studied countries.

Potential Explanations for Declining Youth Vaping

Experts theorize a few factors driving down teen vaping:

Crackdowns on flavored pod bans and retail ID checks

Educational programs on vaping risks

Loss of novelty as rates stabilize from initial spikes

Ongoing monitoring will reveal if new regulations and awareness campaigns continue decreasing youth vaping engagement.

Key Takeaways from the Data

CDC, FDA, and global data consistently show youth cigarette smoking and vaping declining in tandem. This contrasts arguments that increased e-cig usage serves as a gateway to teen smoking.

While vigilance remains important, evidence does not suggest vaping access increases youth cigarette adoption. Instead, it points to vaping displacing smoking experimentation.

[seat-safety-switch]

If your living conditions are anything like mine, then you also exist inside one of the largest, most complex machines ever devised by humanity. I speak, of course, of a city. Cities are full of hundreds of thousands of interacting components that all have to work well in order to accomplish their goals. When even one small sub-system breaks down, it has unpredictable effects that can lead to societal failure. Last weekend, we came real close to that red line.

As I’ve talked about previously, I have picked up a part-time job at City Hall. More specifically, I work directly for The Mayor Himself as a sort of dirty-tricks specialist. Like all the best jobs, I got this through nepotism: we went to high school together, and he knows I certainly didn’t follow him through the rest of his life after that. To his elite buddies and hyper-rich golf pals, I might as well just be a weird unhoused person that he occasionally gives a thousand dollars to in large manila envelopes.

Although the idealists and dreamers out there might not like it, sometimes you do need a dirty-tricks guy to get things done. Last weekend, that problem was the park garbage cans. These are bear-proof bins, even in parts of the city that has never seen a bear not manufactured by the Ty Corporation, and they are very durable, but they are not fireproof. Kids had been throwing their disposable vape batteries into them, which caused little lithium-ion explosions when they were compacted in the trash truck. Rightfully, the trash truck operators were very concerned about this turn of events, and refused to pick up park trash until someone Did Something About This.

I’m definitely no expert in electrical engineering. In fact, I got banned from the local elementary school for teaching kids about how to burn the insulation off of stolen copper wire. What I do know, however, is that necessity is the mother of invention. I went to the public library, hopped on the ol’ Wikipedia, and figured out what the combustion temperature of those pesky vape batteries were. Then, I devised a prototype. The Mayor visited, but in disguise (wearing a sweatshirt over top of his Brooks Brothers suit) lest the opportunists from Channel Four Action News were lurking in the bushes trying to find non-union sex workers again.

So, yes, I did start a forest fire by strapping a propane-fired 2.2-litre Chevrolet pushrod four to the bottom of a garbage can and then venting the exhaust ports directly into the trash. I had not factored in that, without liquid cooling, the head gasket would fail and the engine would tear itself free from the bottom of the can, shooting burning fuel all over the dry tinder grass of the Saint Accidents Semi-Accessible Park. You will note, however, that the batteries were not what started the fire. Mission accomplished, I say, but politics has a way of moving the goalposts on you.

[cocteautwinslyrics]

idc who's winning that election I'm moving to America the moment the ban disposable vapes in the UK hits #Real

[head-post]

UK to ban disposable vapes from June to protect teens

The British government announced that the sale of disposable vape devices would be banned in England from June next year, according to Reuters.

The measure is linked to environmental damage and the growing use of e-cigarettes among children. Vaping has spread rapidly in Britain over the past decade, with nearly one in 10 people buying and using the products.

Despite claims that vapes are supposed to help people quit smoking, health authorities are concerned that their colourful designs and tasty flavours are designed to attract children to smoking.

One in five children aged 11-17 said they had tried vaping, according to a 2024 survey by health charity ASH.

The plan to ban disposable vapes was originally outlined by the previous Conservative government in January, alongside a measure to ban the purchase of cigarettes by those aged 15 and under.

The Labour government also plans to introduce a full smoking bill as part of what it calls “the biggest public health intervention in a generation” to protect young people from nicotine addiction. Minister for public health and prevention, Andrew Gwynne, stated:

Banning disposable vapes will not only protect the environment, but importantly reduce the appeal of vapes to children and keep them out of the hands of vulnerable young people.

According to government figures, nearly five million disposable vape devices were thrown on the ground or in general waste every week in 2023. They ended up in landfill or incinerated, posing a fire threat due to lithium-ion batteries.

Read more HERE

[manjaro-official]

i think we should ban disposable vapes Immediately

[memecucker]

Does anyone why/how exactly disposable vapes got an exemption from the flavored vape ban? Because they were hardly a niche category, it was the original way e-cigs hit the market in a wide way. But also the companies that make them aren’t typically that large or powerful or even entrenched like if lobbyist influence was a thing you’d think Juul or Vuse would be able to be exempt. And just as a hunch but I feel like underage vaping would be predisposed to disposables anyway since they’re less intimidating seeming