“spicy pillow” jokes aside, I think @flowerkrone​’s tags deserve a serious reply:

#my old phone looks like this on my shelf lmao #im too scared to touch it to throw it away #idk what trash this even goes into when its at this point

The pillow-shaped object here used to be the phone’s battery. It’s not a battery anymore. Now it’s a balloon full of corrosive, pyrophoric chemicals and hydrogen gas and it’s one puncture away from burning your house down. I am 100% serious. You should be scared to touch it.

But you gotta touch it, because you gotta get it out of your house before the pressure builds up to the point where the balloon pops. This isn’t going to happen soon – there is no need to panic – but it will happen eventually.

And, indeed, it doesn’t go in the ordinary trash. You put this in the ordinary trash and you’re gonna set the garbage truck on fire. Don’t do that to the garbage collectors, their job is hard enough already.

The first thing you need to do is get a fireproof container. The most common household item that qualifies as a fireproof container is a cast-iron cookpot with a cast-iron lid – often sold as a “Dutch oven.” Any other cooking container that’s unreactive, has a very high melting point, and has a lid made of the same materials will also work: enameled or stainless steel, Pyrex with glass lid, etc.

However: Do not use a pot with a PTFE-based non-stick coating. If the battery does explode, the fire will probably be hot enough to degrade a PTFE coating, producing toxic smoke. (Not that you should breathe the smoke from the battery fire either, but PTFE breakdown products are worse.) Do not use a pot made of aluminium or copper. The fire might even get hot enough to melt those.

Whatever container you use, you might have to throw away along with the phone, so don’t use your good Dutch oven for this. Go to a thrift store and buy a cheap one.

Once you have the fireproof container:

  1. Gently pick up the phone and put it in the fireproof container. If possible, gently tape the phone to the bottom of the container to prevent it from bouncing around. Don’t put any padding in there, that’ll just make a fire worse if it does happen. Put the lid on and tape it shut.
  2. Put a label on the container, something like “DEFECTIVE LI-ION BATTERY – FIRE HAZARD”.
  3. It is now reasonably safe to move the container around. However, if the battery does explode, the container is very likely to leak smoke and get hot, so keep it in a well-ventilated area and away from things that will be damaged by heat. Don’t leave it exposed to the weather, either.
  4. You need to find either a hazardous waste disposal site, or an e-waste recycler that will accept defective Li-ion batteries. I can’t help with that because I have no idea where you live.
  5. However, your local fire department, if you have one, will probably be happy to help. Call their non-emergency number. Nothing is on fire yet, so this isn’t an emergency, but things that can easily start a fire are still within the fire department’s responsibilities. Tell them you have a phone with a bulging lithium-ion battery, you put it in a fireproof container, and you want to know how to dispose of it safely.
  6. If the fire department tries to tell you this isn’t dangerous or it’s okay to throw it out in the regular trash (with or without fireproof container), hang up on them and write a cranky letter to your local government representatives, then keep looking for a proper disposal site.
  7. When you do find a a hazardous waste disposal site or an e-waste recycler, call them and make sure they will take defective Li-ion batteries, before showing up. That’s also a good time to ask if they will let you have the fireproof container back.

Reblog to save lives.

The above is a great resource, and if you want more information, here is the FAQ post from the subreddit r/spicypillows.

im seriously considering developing my own open source p2p+e2ee blogging /social media software along with a hole punching service to facilitate it

I'd be interested in using it

I may be interested but I'd have to hear more

For those who do not know i have 11 years of development experience along with one go at a similar project before (insert complicated backstory here) and i do think i could do this with my skillset and a little education

Okay so for more details, p2p is peer to peer, you might be familiar with BitTorrent (this is the protocol torrenting tools implement) which is peer to peer file sharing, here peer to peer would mean your content doesn't get stored on a server* and that you have more control over your content. E2ee means end to end encrypted, meaning that if the network is compromised they still won't be able to get at your data because it will be encrypted, it can only be decrypted by the sender and receiver, this basically means more security.

As for the hole punching service and the *, this is a common tool used in cases where true peer to peer is impossible (which is most cases), the service I would be making would simply transfer data between two people using websockets so that if the server is compromised your data would have to be grabbed from memory and decrypted.

So bottom line, you wanna blog? You wanna not be dependent on centralized servers and databases? I've got you. If you've got questions, suggestions, recommendations, I'm all ears.

If i could get some more eyes on this I'd appreciate it ^_^ I'd like to see if there's a desire for this

:3