Americans throw out 5.7 disposable vapes every second

Disposable vapes are a particularly insidious form of pollution because they’re nicotine, plastic, and electronic waste all in one.

fastcompany.com/91368463/ameri…

E-waste is the fastest growing waste in the world--and the most toxic.

there are NFC chips in at least some ctities' metro tickets, maybe many?

i know boston and montreal both use paper, disposable tickets with chips in them

they are useful i guess, but one would think they'd have some better methods with less waste

digital pregnancy tests…

bbc.com/news/technology-540259…

The surprising secret hidden in a pregnancy test

Researchers take apart a digital pregnancy testing kit and find a standard paper strip inside.

^{BBC News}

One of the major shipping carriers, I think UPS, puts RFID label tags on many of their packages.

I have a collection of several dozen waiting for me to have the time to dump them in acid and do some circuit analysis. Curious whose chipset they're using etc.

Pregnancy tests and other single use medical devices like insulin pens. Bank and ID cards. Kids toys with any ‘scanning’ functionality, like RFID, playing cards, tokens, Amiibo etc. RFID or NFC clothing tags in stores are now widespread, as are security labels. Any modern USB cable has a ton of advanced electronics on it beyond two connectors strung together.

Can’t think of any more for now, but I’ll keep pondering on it!

USB-C cables.

(I'm not saying they're not doing anything useful. I'm saying I didn't expect cables to be more than just some copper that establishes an electric connection between pins at some given impedance)

Certain cables have entire chipsets in them now.

For example: hackaday.com/2025/02/06/runnin…

Running Doom On An Apple Lightning To HDMI Adapter

As a general rule of thumb, anything that has some kind of display output and a processor more beefy than an early 90s budget PC can run Doom just fine. As [John] AKA [Nyan Satan] demonstrates in a…

^Hackaday

kids books with buttons to make specific noises. Or my parents recorded themselves reading the night before Christmas in a book designed for that purpose. No replaceable batteries in any of them.

And so many plastic junk noisy kids toys.

the obvious one that leaps to my mind was getting Doom to run* on a pregnancy test - the ultimate of the "use once and dispose of" materials.
pcmag.com/news/yes-doom-is-pla…

*caveats apply

Yes, Doom Is Playable on a Pregnancy Test

California programmer Foone Turing had to replace the test's original CPU and screen, but he got the game to run in the shell that remained.

^{Sherin Shibu (PCMag)}

a model of Intel NUC a decade or so ago came in a box with a chip that loudly played the Intel sound when you opened the box and it detected light.

We cut it out of the box and had a merry month in the office hiding it behind different people's office doors

I remember reading a story I can no longer find from someone who was looking for an Apple cable while traveling, and the ones they found were surprisingly cheap but all of them said you needed to have Bluetooth on, which made no sense for a cable.

Well.

It turns out the Apple licensing fee for their proprietary connector costs more than a Bluetooth chip, so these cables all had USB at one end and a Bluetooth chip embedded in the wire, with a dummy Apple plug that wasn't wired!

One thing that probably falls into this category that I'm not sure how to dispose of: heating pads, heated blankets, and the like.

What's *really* egregious about those is that often I need to lay atop them in order to get the relief I need... buuut they're not designed for that kind of pressure and often contraindicated for the purpose, and so they break.

Some of the railway stations here in southern England are adding redundant departure screens, which are disguised advertising boards, that sport a clock. A clock which updates about twice every three seconds.

I used to set my watch by the station clock.

here is another guy who knows noting about RFID.

Your shoes , man. And your jacket. And your clothes. And your backpack. And everything, more or less.

Someone gave me a real estate ad they received in the mail. It was by a very expensive home builder, and it was a "card" that came in a fancy little box. The card was all cardboard, but it had a fucking display and speakers and crap hot glued in so they could blabber sales at you when you opened it.

I replaced the video with a Rick Roll and gave up when the internet said the chip was ancient and shit and not even really hackable without a significant hardware investment.

A differently disgusting part was that it had a SIM card and cellular modem in it. The company that made it tracked engagement with the cardboard ad. (And I'm sure they also tracked geolocation.)

probably not surprising they have microchips, but surprising they are so disposable:

Continuous glucose monitors such as the ironically-named Freestyle Libre stop working after 2 weeks. Diabetics have dispose of 26 of them a year.

It's not clear why but folks speculate it's the battery. You could design a slightly bigger one with a replaceable battery of course.

Not really, sorry. But just last week my local finnish tv news showed police with box of seized vapes. It contained hundreds of vapes all collected from underaged in just few months.

Since I was child, I've hoped all the nonsense short lifespan toys to not include electronics.

@owenblacker some theme park Coke Freestyle cups contain an NFC chip so the machines can track the cups and ensure they are only reused on the day of purchase.

Especially bad if the operator doesn’t allow reactivation on return visits but forces you to buy another plastic reusable cup on your next visit.

single use power banks.

Edit: that's obviously not hidden. Sorry, I misinterpreted the original question.