Tech repair expert bemoans waste of lithium in vapes
Discarded vapes are not merely unsightly litter, they are also a horrendous waste of the valuable metal lithium – needed in huge quantities to make batteries, including the batteries that power electric vehicles.
That’s the message that Mullingar tech expert Steve Sherwood has driven home in a viral video that shows him demonstrating how even cheap vapes each contain a highly-powerful lithium battery.
“All vapes have electronics in them,” Steve told the Westmeath Examiner, revealing something that never even crosses the minds of most users. Whatever about the reusable vapes, where at least the batteries are in use for the lifetime of the product, he thinks it’s incredible that the disposable vapes are just cast aside when there is still so much potential in the batteries.
“These vapes are pretty much just one use. You might get a day or two out of them – although some people get less or more – but they’re essentially just disposable,” he says, stating they can be then seen discarded alongside the canal, near schools or on the streets.
“They all have batteries in them – and they’re actually a super high density lithium polymer batteries,” says Steve.
“It’s the same technology that is used to make phone batteries; they’re extremely high density. So you can actually power lots of lots of stuff off them.”
The cheapest vapes can be bought for less than €10 – but the materials in the battery could be recycled. The thing that really frustrates Steve is that lithium has to be mined – and it’s not easy to mine, bringing with it questions of environmental impact and conditions for mine workers.
“There’s also questions about having enough lithium to power all these electric cars: each lithium car battery takes what is in about 10,000 vape batteries – and the battery is the most expensive part of an electric car,” he says.
“To be honest, they shouldn’t be selling batteries like this in one-use products. These batteries can be recharged 1000 times – the same as your phone, which can be recharged for three years or two years. It’s mad.”
There is a fire risk associated with lithium batteries, so Steve wouldn’t recommend anyone who doesn’t know what they are doing tricking around with them. On his viral video, however, he showed one powering a fan and says the batteries pack way more punch than the normal AA battery with which we are all familiar.
Steve, who is based on Dominick Street, has been garnering worldwide audiences with his videos, which show some of the high-tech items brought in to him for repair.
While around 60 per cent of his viewers are in Ireland, a significant are in America and the UK, and he has even had a device posted to him from South Africa for repair. There is virtually no one doing the sort of repairs that he does – and remarkably, he is self-taught.
“There’s no course that would actually lead you in this position. If I did straight electrical engineering, I’d’ve ended up working for some company doing research, but you would never be doing repairs,” says Steve.
“It was just I always loved it,” he continues, adding that it was an interest his brothers shared also growing up in Greenpark.
About 70 per cent of the devices sent to Steve for repair are from agricultural or industrial machines, and a lot of the work has to be done under a microscope. There isn’t even documentation online for some of the computers he deals with, so often he finds himself having to reverse-engineer the circuits in order to be able to create solutions.