Why it matters: Disposable vapes are terrible for the environment. More than 11 million of the devices are sold every month, and once the flavored nicotine juice runs dry, they end up in landfills – lithium-ion batteries, microcontrollers, LEDs, and all. Those batteries are particularly dangerous because they increase the risk of waste fires. But a group of makers in New York City has figured out a way to give dead cartridges a second life, and it involves sucking on them again.
The Vape Synth is a project from a trio who call themselves Paper Bag Team. Kari Love and David Rios are professors at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program, while Shuang Cai is a PhD student at Cornell who also teaches at both universities.
None of them actually vape, for the record.
What they do instead is crack open spent Elf Bar cartridges – specifically the EB BC5000, a wildly popular Chinese-made model that has sold millions of units in the US – and hack them into tiny digital instruments.
The finished product still looks like a vape. It's got the same case, battery, and charging circuit. But inside, there's a small speaker now, along with an array of buttons and photoresistors on the surface. You play it by putting your mouth on the mouthpiece and breathing inward, just like you would with the original device.
That activates the vape's existing low-pressure sensor, which triggers an oscillator circuit and generates sound. Covering the photoresistors with your fingers changes the tone.
And how does it sound? Well, not great. But that's the point – it's designed to be "goofy," as reported by Wired, since that makes it more attractive. The project is supposed to be "upstream salvage," meaning the goal isn't to position it as a fix for e-waste. Rather, it's to draw attention and encourage others to get creative with discarded tech.
The backstory is amusing, too. Love said the idea started when a student asked her for help building a miniature fog machine. Her first instinct was to take apart a vape, but the student never came back, leaving her with an unfinished device. She mentioned it to Rios, and eventually the two looped in Cai, which is how Paper Bag Team was born.
It should be noted, this is far from the first time people have gotten creative with vapes.
We've seen plenty of ingenuity recently, from recycled vape batteries being used to charge phones and e-bikes to the modder who ensured a vape became a speedy web server.
Makers are turning discarded vapes into tiny musical instruments
