I will say, though, disposable vapes with microcontrollers inside (and even full games and screens from recent reporting) are an egregious source of e-waste. Many layers of stupid are present here.
But the one in the FTA comes with a full fat microcontroller and USB-C connector! I'm not clear if these connectors are accessible outside or if you need to break open the packaging before being able to get to it.
Like you said: "Many layers of stupid are present here"
All that hardware must surely be worth more than half the value of the actual product!
I'm constantly struck at how bread (a pastry, say) in a plastic tray, wrapped in plastic, is so crazy to me. The effort and technology that went, and goes, into oil extraction and such - only to throw the packaging away immediately that I get home ... it's just so unsustainable.
I wonder when in the West we'll start mining rubbish dumps ('refuse sites' where household waste is buried)? Maybe we already have? I know in developing countries people spend their days manually picking over such places.
Never, because we have virtually unlimited space for landfills, and landfill tech has quietly been improving over the last few centuries, to the point that landfills are cheap, non-polluting, and entirely carbon neutral. Countries with less land mass (Europe et al) prefer incineration (mainly to save space, despite it being significantly worse for the environment and much more expensive (although with the newer energy reclamation efforts this is getting better)).
IMO it's not worth worrying about landfills too much. Household waste makes up about 3% of total landfill waste (when you add commercial/industrial/agricultural) in North America. You and your bun wrapper are truly irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.
No. Poorly separated wastes in landfill cause non-trivial methane emissions and other VOCs [0]. While leachate _may_ be captured, most of the time methane is definitely not.
[0] - https://www.epa.gov/lmop/basic-information-about-landfill-ga...