If you vape, there’s a good chance that your favorite vaping devices are disposable. Disposable vapes are the most popular vaping devices on the market today by a long shot, and they’ve been instrumental in helping millions of people switch to vaping because of how convenient and easy to use they are. 

The one thing disposable vapes aren’t, though, is environmentally friendly. When they’re thrown away with household trash, disposable vapes contribute plastic waste and lithium to landfills. One way to prevent that from happening is by recycling your devices instead of throwing them away, but some people have gone even further by taking the useful components out of their vapes and turning them into new things.

What can you make from a disposable vape? A typical disposable vape contains a lithium-ion battery and a microcontroller that can actually run useful software, so there’s a much larger possibility space than you might realize if you enjoy making interesting things. 

Want to see what’s possible? These are the 4 coolest things that people have made from empty disposable vapes.

New Batteries and Battery Packs

Arguably, the most useful component of any disposable vape is the lithium-ion battery at its core. There never seems to be enough lithium for all of the things that we want to produce, which is one of the reasons why electric vehicles cost so much.

The thing about disposable vapes is that even when they’re empty, their batteries are still useful. A lithium-ion battery lasts through around 300-500 charge cycles on average, but a typical disposable vape is only recharged a handful of times before it’s discarded. 

Some people are unhappy about the hundreds of charge cycles that are going unused, so they’re taking the batteries out of disposable vapes and using them for other things. Here are just a few of the most interesting examples.

• Volunteers in the United Kingdom are taking components from empty disposable vapes and turning them into battery packs for night vision goggles, drones and phones in Ukraine.
• Chris Doel took the batteries out of 130 disposable vapes discarded at a single music festival and used them to build an e-bike with 48 volts and 1,500 watts of total power. The e-bike was capable of traveling more than 20 miles on a charge. Doel also created an extremely useful power bank capable of rapidly charging mobile phones and laptops.
• Reddit user thedefibulator created a 100-watt power bank from empty disposable vapes. Another user in the same thread mentioned installing the battery from a disposable vape in a rechargeable mouse.
• On YouTube, a channel called Project VapeLight describes a process for removing a few unnecessary components from an empty disposable vape and turning the rest of the device into a flashlight. This project even retains the device’s original outer shell, keeping the waste to an absolute minimum.

If you’re not comfortable working with battery cells yourself, that’s exactly why recycling services for batteries and e-waste exist. The lithium in your disposable vapes can be recovered and turned into new batteries, potentially reducing the volume of lithium that needs to be mined. Who knows – it’s entirely possible that the battery pack in your next electric vehicle will contain lithium recovered from an empty disposable vape.

Computers

A disposable vape contains an embedded microcontroller that handles functions like managing the different power levels, controlling the built-in screen and ensuring that the device charges safely. A microcontroller has all of the essential components of a computer, including a processor, non-volatile storage, memory and some form of input-output functionality. A recent teardown on Bogdan Ionescu’s blog revealed that a disposable vape contained:

• A Cortex M0+ processor with a clock speed of 24 MHz.
• 24 KB of non-volatile storage.
• 3 KB of RAM.

Although 24 KB isn’t a great deal of storage, it’s still possible to do something useful with it as long as you’re capable of writing efficient code. For example, the original Pac-Man arcade game required just 16 KB of ROM storage and 3 KB of RAM. Ionescu turned his disposable vape into a functional web server.

Is it possible to turn empty disposable vapes into more capable computers? Who knows. Maybe someone will find a way to link them together and build a computer powerful enough to run DOOM.

Artwork

Some people have used discarded disposable vapes to create art installations as a commentary on the waste that people generate by discarding their devices improperly instead of recycling them. In 2024, a group of community volunteers in the United Kingdom used 4,500 disposable vapes that they had collected as litter to create a five-foot-tall sculpture illustrating the importance of recycling used vapes instead of throwing them away.

Miniature Display

It has become increasingly common for modern disposable vapes to include screens that help users monitor their batteries and e-liquid levels. Although most vapes have simple segmented displays that aren’t useful for much, some devices have true screens that are potentially useful for almost anything as long as you can figure their interfaces out.

In 2024, tech enthusiast Jason Gin disassembled a Kraze KH7K vape to learn about the capabilities of its screen. He discovered that the screen had a resolution of 80 by 160 pixels, which isn’t bad for such a small display. After he learned how to interface with the screen, he flashed his vape with new firmware that gave the device an entirely new visual interface with a retro Windows 95 theme. 

Although having the ability to give your vape a new interface is certainly fun, that’s only useful until the device is empty – so why stop there? Functional displays aren’t exactly cheap, and almost every high-end disposable vape has one these days. If you enjoy tinkering with hardware, it’ll be relatively trivial for you to remove the displays from your empty devices and use them for other projects. In fact, the screen from a disposable vape would provide a perfect readout for a portable power bank.