No we're not. Disposable batteries should not be a thing anywhere, especially not in products where they cannot easily be removed by design. Alkaline batteries may not combust when damaged, but their internal juice leaking out is damn corrosive.

> A fully discharged battery shouldn't do much.

Even that is enough to light trash compactor trucks or the heaps on waste collection plants to fire. This shit is becoming a massive problem for the trash hauler and processing industry. One in Australia blames 35 (!) fires a day in the country... no surprise if 1.8 million of them are sold a week [1]. This is frankly insane, and the rise in trash fires directly corresponds with disposable vapes.

Additionally, we need every bit of lithium we can get for electric vehicles and other stuff. Not for throwaway devices.

[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-12-02/qld-lithium-ion-batte...

Just spitballing here, but considering that at typical intersections, automobile traffic outnumbers cyclist traffic by at least 100:1, isn't it more likely that those vapes were throw out the window of a car when someone got frustrated they clogged or something? (I'm not a vaper, but I've heard of clogged vapes being a common occurrence).

If true, then the hedonism and pleasure seeking (the homeostatic pleasure trap is a monkey trap) found within the big, global industrial complex is meant for a small set of secret hackers to take advantage of by collecting disposed "vape" or smoking pleasure devices for powering some cool nerd contraptions.

Don't be afraid to get your hands dirty when you pick up trash. Because capitalism produces treasure when it excretes its waste products.

You just have to be outside the capitalist world-system to do this cool trick.

Except when your watch battery dies, you only dispose of the battery, not together with the watch, as is the case with those single-use vapes.