There are a lot of things that get landfilled that have some marginal value, but generally if there’s not a huge amount of money to be made recycling things they won’t get recycled. It might not be surprising to most that this is true of almost all plastic, a substantial portion of glass, and even a lot of paper and metals, but what might come as a shock is that plenty of rechargeable lithium batteries are included in this list as well. It’s cheaper to build lithium batteries into one-time-use items like disposable vape pens and just throw them out after one (or less than one) charge cycle, but if you have some spare time these batteries are plenty useful.
[Chris Doel] found over a hundred disposable vape pens after a local music festival and collected them all to build into a battery powerful enough for an ebike. Granted, this involves a lot of work disassembling each vape which is full of some fairly toxic compounds and which also generally tend to have some sensitive electronics, but once each pen was disassembled the real work of building a battery gets going. He starts with testing each cell and charging them to the same voltage, grouping cells with similar internal resistances. From there he assembles them into a 48V pack with a battery management system and custom 3D printed cell holders to accommodate the wide range of cell sizes. A 3D printed enclosure with charge/discharge ports, a power switch, and a status display round out the build.
With the battery bank completed he straps it to his existing ebike and hits the trails, easily traveling 20 miles with barely any pedal input. These cells are only rated for 300 charge-discharge cycles which is on par for plenty of similar 18650 cells, making this an impressive build for essentially free materials minus the costs of filament, a few parts, and the sweat equity that went into sourcing the cells. If you want to take an ebike to the next level of low-cost, we’d recommend pairing this battery with the drivetrain from the Spin Cycle.\
Thanks to [Anton] for the tip!
Oh, this should be an interesting set of comments. Volatile. Inflammatory, even.
I’m delighted to see someone using at least some PPE while handling discarded vapes. Mentioning the biozazard is a nice addition too. A few people at a local maker space got seriously ill this summer following heavy 2nd-hand nicotine exposure from handling a substantial quantity of vapes without gloves.
That printed enclosure is the most elegant one I’ve seen yet. It would be interesting to see how well air flows through it as it scales. Some extra thermocouples mounted deeper inside the enclosure would probably give better readings that one just stuffed down a cavity on the edge.
Yes, nicotine is readily absorbed through skin and minute doses already can cause severe symptoms.
In the toxicological literature there’s a classic case of a farmer who had used a nicotine solution as an insecticide, spilled some on his clothing and was administered to the hospital. On discharge he wore the same clothes, so was back in a short while later.
You worry about plant alkaloid toxicity, I worry about HPV and viruses. We are not the same.
Old laptop batteries, too… but each cell needs to be individually tested and matched for the clusters. You don’t want old cells with low capacity mixing with fresher ones with high.
Bravo! I make regular visits to local recycle center to recover 18650 Laptop batteries. It amazes me how man of these units contain mostly good cells with one bad one. I have been powering my flashlights and head lamps this way for several years and recently began building power tool batteries with them also.
I prefer Tenga to Fleshlight, much better experience imo.
heh i am always in a battle to maintain bike lights so i perked up at the idea of using free batteries in that endeavor but then i remembered the actual problems i face.
my lights fail for a variety of reasons but they’re mostly mechanical. in the individual unit, the battery generally outlasts the rest of it. (though one lasted 6 years and the battery might have contributed to the failure). so i only need a new battery when i build a new light, and that $5 (i get small prismatic cells that seem to be aftermarket old-phone parts?) doesn’t seem to bother me. it goes right in with the like $3 for a switch, $1 for LEDs, and $2 for USB-lion charge board, all dwarfed by the like 3 hours of effort.
so basically my experience reaffirms your observation: i’m effectively throwing out middle-of-lifetime “decently usable” batteries. :)
That really only applies for batteries in series. In parallel it doesn’t matter if you mix capacities, it’ll still work. Weeding out the garbage is still a good idea though.
in parallel it doesn’t matter as much :)
If one is building a proper e-bike, there will be a lot of battery clusters in series. Even in parallel, having one anomalous cell will cause the pack to self-discharge much faster.
Vapes look like toys you’d get with a McDonald’s happy meal, it’s kinda funny. Its less funny when you realise it’s working and it’s mostly teenagers who are smoking these.
That aside, i have never heard of 20400 cells before. I bought a bunch of 6000mAh LiFePO4 32700 cells for ~3$ each but i have been unable to use them for 2 reasons, the first their chargers aren’t very common (not a big issue, a 317 set to 3.67V can charge them just fine), the second i cannot find any holders for them so i cannot use these cells to power my prototypes.
18650s are quite good in that way, you can find cheap cell holders that you can permanently put on whatever you need to power.
How about 3D printing holders? You can get the terminals from Digikey.
I find it interesting that this product can exist, despite the serious health issues it imposes on the ignorant and hype sensitive youngsters it’s targeted to (with it’s funny colors and flavors). It creates way too much e-waste!
In fact… vaping or e-cigarettes are so bad in so many ways that they actually make the traditional form of smoking look good again, which is not a good thing.
I have a bunch of friends who vape and have them save them for me and have probably over 500 now, but I use them in a ton of small projects and mostly for drone batteries. Wearing gloves is a good idea, I’m glad they pointed that out, it can be nasty but aside from the nicotine exposure, more important is risk of tuberculosis, hepatitis and a multitude of other factors. People put their mouth on them so please be careful and not a statistic.