You might say the innovation took flight thanks to a favor. A student at New York University asked Kari Love, who teaches there, to help build a tiny fog machine. Being the sort of person who solves a problem by dismantling something nearby, Love reached for a dead disposable vape to harvest the parts. The student then wandered off and never returned.
Love kept the vape, and eventually the fog machine abandoned her attention, because she had noticed how much usable hardware was sitting inside a device that most people these days treat as garbage. The penny had dropped – a disposable vape doesn’t really need to be disposed of.
So she started pulling them apart to see what the salvaged parts could be repurposed for. Most of the early attempts went nowhere, in the way that most tinkering does, but the airflow sensor kept nagging away at her. It was built to respond to human breath, which is an oddly expressive thing for a throwaway gadget to do. Eventually, in the usual lightbulb moment that precedes inventions like this, she realized something, and further tinkering led to the creation of a synthesizer.
The synth lives inside the old vape shell, and you play it by sucking on it, the same way you used the vape. But the bit they most wanted to salvage is the airflow sensor, the component that, in a real vape, detects your inhalation and switches on the coil. Keep the sensor, and the only natural way to trigger it is to draw breath in. Governed by pure common sense and sound logic, they had built an instrument you have to inhale to play.
The Build
They call themselves the Paper Bag Team because they keep their unfinished projects in paper bags. None of them vape, incidentally. Love and David Rios teach at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, and Shuang Cai is doing a PhD at Cornell. Their whole idea is to grab something on its way to the bin and give it another job first. They call it upstream salvage, a growing movement in which industrious, inventive people all over the world find alternative uses for discarded vape batteries.
Much of the genius lives in its simplicity. The vape keeps its case, battery, charging circuit, and airflow sensor. They pull out the heating element and wiring, replacing it with a few cheap parts, including a 555 timer, some photoresistors, and a small speaker. The 555 is ancient, the sort of chip electronics hobbyists have a soft spot for, and it costs almost nothing, although the noise it makes is pretty bad, with its own inventors calling it screechy and chaotic.
One model has buttons for pitch. The other reads light, so you bend the notes by putting your fingers over the sensors, and that one has a flaw. Love tried to show it off in a bar, thought it had broken, and it took her a minute to realize the bar was just dark. She held a phone light over it and carried on regardless.
What It Is Actually About
You could call this three academics playing with rubbish, and Love would half-agree, but she says the music was never really the point. The point is the rubbish itself, and specifically how much of it there is. The numbers are quite staggering.
Americans bin about 5.7 disposable vapes every second, according to the US Public Interest Research Group, equating to roughly half a million a day going into landfill. Every one of them has a rechargeable lithium battery that has hardly been used, a sensor capable of detecting human breath, and often a processor with more power than the computers NASA used in the 1960s.
The device is designed to work for a few days and then be thrown in a bin. Nobody at the Paper Bag Team thinks their synth fixes any of this; it just makes the waste harder to look away from, which counts for something, even when the thing doing the pointing sounds like a broken kazoo. But then, that’s hardly the point, is it?
Dull Alternative
Of course, the way to avoid producing this litter has existed for years and requires no ingenuity at all. You simply buy a device you keep. One of the best vape kits UK retailers stock will outlast a whole dumpster of disposables, charge off your phone cable, and conveniently refill from a bottle. The battery gets used until it is actually finished, with no one taking it apart in a Brooklyn workshop just to make a point.
What makes the synth worth writing about is that it should not be possible. You should not be able to build a working musical instrument out of something sold as single-use, because a single-use object should not contain a good battery, a live sensor, and a small computer, all still working, all on their way to being buried.
It took three people in New York with a bag of dead disposable vapes to make that obvious.
