As I’ve written before. One of the problems we’re dealing with is the preponderance of single use plastic and concurrent waste that occurs due to it.
I’m a smoker. I smoke cannabis. I like to smoke a joint and so I need to have something to light that joint. For a long time I used Bic lighters just like just about everybody else, sometimes using the cheaper variants. But all in all, a non refillable plastic lighter. And those non refillable plastic lighters would just enter into the the trash stream. You’d see it at the end of festivals. They’d be all over the place. They’d be be one of the things I’d pick up doing cleanup afterwards. There on the ground, would be wasted, disposable lighters.
Well that bothered me. As one of my steps towards a less disposable consumer I searched out any type of metal refillable lighter I could find. I found a few different kinds. Many of them were variations of a butane torch. I looked at the Zippos. You know the regular standard. The old, old styled wet cotton, lighter. You know, soak the cotton with fuel, cotton work and get a nice big flame off of it. Many nice cases and stuff for those types of lighters, and it’s certainly a much more sustainable form of lighting a joint. Flint and steel, minimal use of petroleum distillate and even alcohol could be used.
So that is a rather practical old style lighter that has still has some value, but I don’t like the smell of the fuel and the lighters tend to be just a little bulkier. It’s just a fuel I don’t really like. I don’t like the taste of it. Especially if lighting a pipe. It just tastes terrible.
So I kept looking at the butane torches. I found that I liked the light that you get with a very clean taste. Not that hard to get the fuel, but some of the lighters are rather expensive. Lose a $30 lighter and it’s like, wow. That’s too much to deal with. I found refillable plastic lighters and you can find them as well. They last almost until you lose them. They don’t have a way of replacing the flint or the piezo igniter. Piezo wears out and that’s the end of that device, but still it’s much more than a single use.
I’ve migrated to a product put out by Ronson . It’s called the jet light. It’s primarily a metal lighter. It is refillable, with butane. It is adjustable, so it doesn’t have to be the big torch that a lot of them seem to be. I don’t really need that. I just want a quick little flame, and that’s what this provides.
It’s the JetLite, by Ronson. I like it. I found it for as little as four and a half dollars, (though the price seems to have risen to $12) which is not that much more than you pay for a disposable Bic Lighter. You can find them online, I see them at Walmart and Amazon and such for $6-$15. Yes, it’s bit more than you’re going to pay for a disposable Bic. They’re easier to keep because you don’t lose them as easily. Most other people don’t just put them in their pocket again thinking it’s their lighter because it’s obvious, it’s not their lighter.
People will put a lighter in their pocket because it’s the same color. That doesn’t happen with this lighter as it’s very obvious what it is. People tend to recognize it and then make sure it gets back to where it needs to go.
It’s one more ‘little’ thing that you can do, and that I have done to help eliminate plastic for the smokers out there and people that are still dependent on some sort of fire [always good to have some means of making fire].
Ronson jet light, lighter, I highly recommended. I’ve had, over the past five years, I’ve had two of them. One stop working and I’ve actually got to fix it, and it’s now in my spare. so that’s the way that goes. So there’s a durability there in fact I found that there’s videos YouTube videos on how to repair the PCL electrics on Jet light on YouTube. So it’s definitely got a fan base of people that are looking to keep their footprint as minimal as possible, get the most out of their products, and take things out of the earth, manufacturing, make them less than, and use them as long as possible, so that there’s more of that stuff in the earth and great, great grandkids and those folks coming after. Okay, watch those disposable lighters, get away from it, find yourself a nice slider that you can cherish and use and personalize. Just like people like to do with their big gliders but do it with a lighter that you’ll want to keep and you’ll take care of, and it’ll be another product that will last, maybe even you could, you know, get a nice one, you can hand it down to your grandkids.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai