Can an Industry-Run Recycling Scheme Protect Consumer Choice?

20 September 2026 Howard Toh

Singapore’s Beverage Container Return Scheme (BCRS) has a worthwhile objective: increase the recovery and recycling of beverage containers by putting a refundable 10-cent deposit on regulated cans and bottles.

But as the scheme moves towards full implementation, there is another public interest worth protecting alongside recycling: consumer choice and competition.

In particular, will smaller beverage importers — including the parallel importers that bring Singapore consumers cheaper alternatives, niche brands, unusual flavours and limited-edition products — be able to comply with BCRS as easily and economically as the largest beverage producers?

This question deserves particular attention because BCRS Ltd is itself industry-led.

The National Environment Agency describes BCRS as a "producer-led Scheme". BCRS Ltd’s board comprises Coca-Cola Singapore Beverages, F&N Foods, Pokka, Wanin Industries and Chia Khim Lee Food Industries.

There is nothing inherently wrong with an industry-led scheme. Producers have the technical expertise and, under Extended Producer Responsibility, are supposed to bear responsibility for the waste created by their products.

But BCRS is also mandatory.

From 1 October 2026, regulated beverage products supplied in Singapore must carry the BCRS Deposit Mark, and the 10-cent deposit applies to regulated containers.

That makes the accessibility, cost and neutrality of the compliance process important not merely to beverage companies, but ultimately to Singapore consumers.

One scheme, three very different economies of scale

Consider three hypothetical businesses selling exactly the same category of beverage.

The numbers below are illustrative rather than quotations of what any particular company pays. Their purpose is to demonstrate why the same regulatory requirement can have very different commercial consequences at different scales.

Infographic comparing BCRS compliance economics for a large producer of 1 million units, a small importer of 50,000 units and a niche or parallel importer of 1,000 units. — Illustrative comparison: the same BCRS obligation can produce very different per-unit economics depending on scale. The refundable 10-cent consumer deposit is not treated here as a compliance cost.

Producer A: 1,000,000 containers

Imagine a major beverage producer expecting to sell one million units of a product in Singapore.

At this scale, producing Singapore-specific packaging is commercially realistic. The deposit mark and appropriate barcode can potentially be incorporated into the packaging artwork before cans or bottles leave the production line.

There will still be BCRS producer fees, registration requirements, artwork changes and other implementation costs. But crucially, the company can potentially avoid buying and manually applying one million individual stickers.

Its fixed implementation costs are also spread over one million units. This is economies of scale doing exactly what economies of scale normally do.

Producer B: 50,000 containers

Now consider an independent distributor bringing in 50,000 cans.

Creating a Singapore-only production run may no longer be practical. The overseas manufacturer may have minimum production quantities far beyond what the Singapore importer can sell. Stickering therefore becomes considerably more relevant.

BCRS requires scheme stickers to be ordered through BCRS-appointed printing companies. Stickers from other printers are not accepted. BCRS states a printing lead time of approximately two to six weeks depending on quantity. If the importer wants the printer to perform the physical stickering as well, services can include opening cartons, removing products, applying the stickers and repacking them.

There has been a welcome development for some very small producers. Eligible micro-producers of aluminium cans can obtain up to 50,000 pre-serialised stickers annually instead of individually registering products.

That concession suggests that NEA and BCRS recognise the disproportionate administrative burden that product-by-product registration can impose at small scale.

But it also raises useful questions. Who qualifies? What happens to plastic-bottle importers? What happens when an importer carries many niche SKUs rather than large quantities of a few products? And what are the actual all-in sticker and handling costs after the available assistance ends?

Producer C: 1,000 containers

Finally, consider a parallel importer bringing just 1,000 units of a seasonal Japanese drink, a European craft soda or a limited-edition flavour.

Asking the foreign manufacturer to redesign its production packaging for 1,000 Singapore-bound cans is unlikely to be realistic. The importer therefore needs another route to BCRS compliance.

And this is where per-unit economics become important.

Published reporting has put BCRS-approved stickers at approximately 4 to 18 cents each depending on volume, before the labour required to apply them.

At the upper end of that reported range: 1,000 × $0.18 = $180 in stickers alone.

That is before someone opens the cartons, handles every container, applies every sticker and repacks them. It is also before the ordinary producer fee and administrative requirements.

The 10-cent consumer deposit should not be included in this comparison as though it were another compliance expense: the deposit is refundable to the consumer when the container is returned.

The sticker, handling and compliance expenses are different. Those are genuine costs associated with getting the product onto the Singapore market. For an inexpensive beverage with a thin importer margin, an additional ten or twenty cents per unit can matter considerably.

Same requirement, very different consequences

1,000,000 units: Singapore-specific packaging may be incorporated at the factory. Fixed implementation costs are spread across enormous volume.

50,000 units: Stickering may be necessary, although the micro-producer concession could substantially reduce registration friction for eligible aluminium-can producers.

1,000 units: Singapore-specific manufacturing is much less realistic, while sticker, labour and administrative costs are divided among very few units.

The environmental requirement is identical. The economics are not.

This doesn’t mean that BCRS is deliberately disadvantaging smaller competitors. There is no evidence presented here that it is.

NEA has also introduced a Producer Transition Grant of up to $2,500 to help producers with costs including registration fees, producer fees and scheme stickers. That is a positive acknowledgement that implementation costs can disproportionately affect smaller businesses. But temporary assistance doesn’t eliminate the longer-term question.

Why should consumers care about parallel importers?

It would be easy to treat this as an argument between beverage companies. It isn’t.

Parallel importers and independent distributors perform a useful competitive function in a small market such as Singapore. They can source products from other markets when doing so is commercially attractive. They also bring in products that an official distributor may decide are not worth launching locally: regional flavours, seasonal editions, specialist drinks and brands with relatively small followings.

The result for consumers is potentially more choice and more price competition.

If compliance imposes a relatively small cost on a mass-market beverage but a substantial per-unit cost on a low-volume import, some products may simply cease to be commercially worthwhile to bring into Singapore.

The consumer may never see a line item saying "BCRS compliance: 18 cents". Instead, the drink may become more expensive. Or the importer may decide not to import it at all.

That second outcome is arguably harder for consumers to notice. You cannot complain about the price of a product that quietly disappeared from the market.

The question isn’t whether BCRS should exist

Singapore needs better recycling outcomes, and a container-return system is a legitimate way of pursuing them.

Nor is this article suggesting that BCRS Ltd or the beverage companies involved in it have deliberately disadvantaged their competitors.

Singapore’s competition regulator has previously examined the establishment and operation of BCRS and concluded that the arrangement was unlikely to infringe sections 34 and 47 of the Competition Act.

But regulatory compliance and good governance are not quite the same question as public confidence.

When participation in a national scheme is compulsory, and the organisation administering that scheme was established by major participants in the same industry, transparency becomes particularly important.

Consumers and smaller competitors should be able to understand: How are sticker prices determined? Why must stickers come only from BCRS-appointed suppliers? How competitive was the process for appointing those suppliers? How quickly are products approved? What information about a competing product or importer is visible to BCRS, its management and its board? What safeguards separate commercially sensitive information from companies represented on that board? What happens when a product is rejected? Is there an independent avenue of appeal? And does BCRS monitor whether its requirements are causing low-volume products to disappear from Singapore?

These aren’t accusations. They are questions that become reasonable whenever an industry-led organisation is entrusted with administering a mandatory national scheme affecting every competitor in that industry.

Recycling without sacrificing competition

There need not be a choice between recycling and competition. A successful BCRS should be capable of achieving both.

If technology eventually allows small importers to obtain compliant labels more cheaply, approval becomes faster, administrative requirements are simplified and micro-producer concessions are expanded where evidence shows they are needed, that should be celebrated.

But the measure of the scheme’s success should not simply be the number of containers returned.

We should also ask whether Singapore reached that environmental objective without unnecessarily making it harder for small businesses to compete or reducing the range of products available to consumers.

A million-can producer and a thousand-can importer may both be subject to exactly the same environmental obligation.

Making sure that obligation does not inadvertently become a barrier to competition is precisely why transparency matters.

Sources include the National Environment Agency, BCRS Ltd, the Competition and Consumer Commission of Singapore, and published reporting by CNA. Cost examples in this article are illustrative and should not be interpreted as the actual costs incurred by any named company.

Welcome to the Museum of Meaningless Metrics

21 June 2026 Howard Toh

Welcome to the Museum of Meaningless Metrics

I recently encountered a comic depicting the “Museum of Meaningless Metrics”.

Its exhibits included:

Lines of Code
Story Points
Pull Requests
Tokens Spent

The newest and proudest exhibit was a towering token counter, presumably recording enough artificial intelligence activity to heat a modest apartment block.

The comic is funny because it captures a recurring organisational habit: when something important is difficult to measure, we measure something nearby instead.

Productivity is difficult to measure. Value is difficult to measure. Quality, good judgement, avoided mistakes and long-term maintainability are all difficult to measure.

Counting things, however, is wonderfully easy.

And once a number appears on a dashboard, it acquires an air of authority. It becomes a target, a performance indicator and eventually a presentation slide with an upward-pointing green arrow.

The problem is not that these metrics contain no information. Most of them do. The problem begins when they are promoted from operational signals into proof of productive work.

Exhibit One: Lines of Code

To a non-programmer, lines of code can look like a straightforward measure of output.

One developer writes 500 lines. Another writes 5,000. Clearly, the second developer has done ten times as much work.

That conclusion is roughly as reliable as judging an author by the weight of the manuscript.

A large codebase may genuinely represent a substantial amount of work. A complex application cannot always be produced in 12 elegant lines and a motivational comment. But the number of lines tells us very little about whether the work was necessary, correct or well designed.

Those 5,000 lines could represent:

a major new system;
duplicated logic;
an unnecessarily complicated solution;
generated boilerplate;
poorly understood requirements;
several fixes for problems introduced by earlier fixes.

Meanwhile, an experienced developer might spend a day studying the problem and submit a 20-line change that eliminates the need for hundreds of additional lines.

That does not mean fewer lines are always better. Code can be compressed until it resembles an ancient curse. Readability, maintainability and testing matter more than winning a code-golf tournament.

The meaningful questions are not “How many lines were written?” but:

Does the software solve the intended problem?
Is it reliable?
Can somebody else understand it?
Can it be changed safely later?
Did it reduce or introduce complexity?

Lines of code can help estimate the size of a codebase. They are poor evidence of an individual developer’s productivity.

Exhibit Two: Story Points

I have participated in sprint-estimation exercises and have also been asked to assign story points.

In theory, story points provide a relative indication of a task’s size. They can incorporate effort, complexity, uncertainty and risk. A task assigned eight points is not necessarily expected to take eight hours or eight days. It is simply considered substantially larger or less predictable than a task assigned two points.

The Fibonacci-like sequence—1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 and so on—is intended to discourage fake precision. As tasks become larger, our confidence in estimating them usually decreases. The gap between the available numbers forces teams to acknowledge that uncertainty.

That is the theory.

In practice, the exercise can sometimes feel like a group of people cautiously plucking numbers from the sky while discreetly checking what everyone else has plucked.

Developers and requestors may view the same task very differently. One sees a minor form change. The other sees legacy code, undocumented dependencies, six integration points and a database that becomes emotionally unstable after 4 p.m.

Ideally, disagreement exposes hidden assumptions. Someone who estimates a task as two points may know something the person estimating eight does not. The discussion is supposed to produce shared understanding.

But the process breaks down when:

people anchor their estimates to the first number mentioned;
participants follow the majority to avoid defending a different view;
developers agree on the answer beforehand;
management treats points as hours in disguise;
velocity becomes a performance target;
teams inflate estimates to make their output appear larger.

At that stage, story points stop being a conversation aid and become ceremonial arithmetic.

The points themselves were never meant to be objective units. An eight-point task for one team cannot reliably be compared with an eight-point task for another. Even within the same team, the meaning may drift as the people, technology and work change.

Story points can help a stable team forecast its own capacity. They become dangerous when outsiders mistake them for a universal measurement of productivity.

Exhibit Three: Pull Requests

Pull requests are an important part of modern software development. They allow proposed changes to be reviewed, discussed, tested and improved before being merged into the main codebase.

That does not make the number of pull requests a meaningful productivity score.

A developer who submits many pull requests may be working in a disciplined way, breaking changes into small and reviewable units. Another developer might submit fewer pull requests because the work involves longer-term research, architecture or debugging.

Or the high count could come from:

repeated corrections;
failed implementations;
unnecessary fragmentation;
automated dependency updates;
trivial formatting changes;
fixes for problems introduced by earlier pull requests.

Conversely, a low number could represent careful, high-impact work—or a single 18,000-line pull request that causes every reviewer to suddenly develop an urgent dental appointment.

The count does not tell us whether the changes were useful, safe or even necessary.

Better questions include:

How quickly are useful changes delivered?
How often do changes introduce defects?
Are reviews substantive or merely ceremonial?
Are pull requests reasonably sized?
Does the team learn from incidents and review feedback?
Are customers or internal users seeing meaningful improvements?

Pull requests are a workflow mechanism. Counting them is like measuring a restaurant by the number of plates that passed through the kitchen.

Interesting, perhaps. Conclusive, no.

Exhibit Four: Tokens Spent

Now we arrive at the museum’s newest attraction: tokens spent.

As organisations adopt generative AI, token counts have become the latest impressively large numbers available for dashboards.

Someone used ten million tokens.

Excellent.

What happened?

Did those tokens produce a working application, complete useful research, resolve customer cases or automate a tedious process?

Or did an AI agent repeatedly inspect the same repository, misunderstand the task, rewrite its own plan six times and confidently announce that it had completed work for which it did not even possess the required credentials?

The token count cannot tell us.

Tokens are units of text processed or generated by an AI model. They matter for practical reasons:

expenditure;
capacity planning;
latency;
model selection;
efficiency optimisation;
detecting unexpectedly wasteful workflows.

But tokens spent are an input cost, not an output measure.

Using more tokens does not necessarily mean that more reasoning occurred. It may mean that the task was complex, the context was large or extensive validation was performed. It may also mean that the prompt was inefficient, the agent became stuck in a loop or the system generated vast quantities of polished nonsense.

Similarly, minimising tokens is not automatically desirable. Spending additional tokens to verify an important result may be entirely justified. A cheap but incorrect answer is not efficient. It is merely an error delivered at a discount.

The more meaningful measures depend on the objective:

Was the task actually completed?
Was the result accurate?
How much human correction was required?
How much time or money was saved?
Was the outcome independently verified?
Did the system avoid inventing actions, identifiers or results?
What was the cost per successful outcome?

“Tokens spent” might earn bragging rights among people with generous compute budgets. It does not, by itself, demonstrate useful work.

When the Metric Becomes the Mission

The deeper issue behind all four exhibits is not measurement itself. Measurement is necessary.

The trouble begins when a proxy becomes a target.

When developers are rewarded for lines of code, codebases grow.

When teams are rewarded for completing story points, estimates mysteriously expand.

When pull-request counts become visible performance measures, work gets divided into more pull requests.

When token usage is presented as proof of AI adoption, systems find remarkably creative ways to consume tokens.

People adapt to the measurement system placed around them. This is not necessarily dishonesty. It is often rational behaviour. If an organisation repeatedly signals that a number matters, employees will naturally optimise for that number.

Unfortunately, the number may become healthier while the actual outcome deteriorates.

What Should We Measure Instead?

There is no single perfect replacement metric. That is precisely why organisations keep returning to convenient counts.

Useful measurement normally requires a combination of quantitative data and human judgement.

Depending on the work, better indicators might include:

successful outcomes delivered;
user or customer impact;
reliability and defect rates;
lead time from request to usable result;
frequency and severity of production incidents;
rework required;
maintainability;
cost per successful task;
quality of documentation and knowledge transfer;
whether the original problem was actually solved.

Even these can be manipulated or misunderstood. No dashboard eliminates the need for context.

A metric should begin a conversation, not end one.

The Museum Is Still Expanding

Lines of code, story points, pull requests and tokens spent are not entirely useless. Each can answer a narrow operational question.

How large is this repository?

How does this team perceive the relative size of upcoming work?

How are changes flowing through the review process?

How much AI capacity are we consuming?

Those are legitimate questions.

The absurdity begins when the answers are repurposed to answer much larger questions:

Who worked hardest?

Which team is most productive?

Who created the most value?

Is our AI programme successful?

Numbers cannot answer those questions simply because they are available, countable and aesthetically compatible with a bar chart.

So perhaps the comic’s museum label is slightly unfair.

These are not always meaningless metrics.

They are metrics from which we frequently demand meaning they were never capable of providing.

And judging by the rate at which dashboards are being built, the museum gift shop should be extremely profitable.

Tupperware Malaysia Is Closing Too — And This Time I Saw It Coming

2 June 2026 Howard Toh

Date: 2 June 2026

I’ve Been Here Before

When Tupperware Singapore shut down in December 2024, I was on holiday with my family. The email landed in my inbox with the subject line “Closure of Tupperware Singapore.” No warning. No runway. Just: stop everything, cease using the logo immediately, and figure the rest out yourself.

I wrote about that experience — the silence from management, the stock left piled up at home, the customers asking about warranties I could no longer honour. It was one of the more stressful chapters of my time as a distributor.

So when an email arrived on 30 May 2026 with the subject “Consultants Termination Notice” from Tupperware Malaysia, my stomach turned. Not because I was surprised. Because I knew exactly what was coming next for the people on the other end.

The Email That Says Everything

Here is the notice Tupperware Malaysia sent to its independent consultants, in full:

NOTICE OF TERMINATION OF INDEPENDENT CONSULTANT AGREEMENT

We write to you as a valued member of the Tupperware Brands Malaysia family.

Ministry of Domestic Trade and Cost of Living (“KPDN”) formally approved our application to transition to a new business model. As part of this transition, we are required to bring the existing Independent Consultant Agreement to a close.

This letter serves as formal notice of that termination pursuant to items 21 and 23 of the General Terms & Conditions of the Tupperware Brands Business Handbook, with an extended notice period of 30 days in place of the standard 7 days to allow you ample time to prepare.

This termination reflects no shortcomings on your part. It is a necessary step in our transition to the newly approved framework.

On 1 July 2026, the new business model will take effect.

In June 2026, you may continue to purchase and conduct your business as usual. All existing product warranties, customer commitments, and ongoing orders will be honoured in full by Tupperware Brands Malaysia. There will be no disruption to your day-to-day selling activities, and we remain fully committed to supporting you and your customers every step of the way.

Also, a Transition Guideline will be distributed to provide you with all the information (including further explanation on new contract requirements) you need to move forward with confidence.

During this transitional period, please be connected with your upline manager as they will walk you through the details of the new arrangement and keep you updated as things progress.

Should you have any questions about the content of this letter or wish to discuss your options further, please do not hesitate to reach out to your upline Manager or your DSMs. They will be happy to guide you through the process.

We are genuinely excited about what the new model brings and believe it will create an even stronger foundation for your business. We look forward to continuing this journey together, and to an exciting future ahead.

Thank you sincerely for your dedication and the trust you have placed in Tupperware Brands Malaysia.

The termination notice sent to Tupperware Malaysia consultants on 30 May 2026.

Best regards,

Tupperware Brands Malaysia Sdn. Bhd.

The Language of Corporate Kindness

Let me translate that for anyone who has never been on the receiving end of a termination notice dressed in corporate optimism.

“Extended notice period of 30 days in place of the standard 7 days”

This is the line that floored me. The handbook apparently allows them to give just seven days notice. They are being “generous” by giving thirty. Thirty days to wind down a business some people have built over years or decades. Thirty days to clear stock, notify customers, and somehow pivot to a “new business model” that nobody has explained yet. The email mentions a “Transition Guideline” that will be distributed — future tense, no date given.

“This termination reflects no shortcomings on your part”

Of course it doesn’t. The consultants did nothing wrong. They sold the products, hit their targets, built their downlines, and trusted the brand. The shortcoming is entirely on the side of a company that has decided the independent consultant model no longer suits its corporate restructuring — after profiting from that exact model for years.

“We remain fully committed to supporting you”

In my Singapore experience, that commitment translated to an overwhelmed Division Sales Manager who stopped answering emails, and a directive to immediately stop using branding I had built my business around. I hope Malaysian consultants have a better experience. I am not optimistic.

What Happens to the Stock?

Here is the question the email delicately avoids: what do consultants do with the inventory they have already purchased?

Tupperware’s model encourages — and in some cases requires — consultants to hold stock. When the music stops, that stock does not magically turn back into cash. In my case, I was left with products I could no longer sell under the Tupperware name, and a customer base that suddenly had no warranty path. The email says “existing product warranties… will be honoured in full.” That is welcome news for customers. It does not help the consultant who has RM 5,000, RM 10,000, or RM 50,000 worth of product sitting in their spare room and no clear channel to move it.

What Happens to the People?

This is the part that genuinely bothers me. Tupperware in Malaysia is not just a product line. For many consultants — predominantly women, many of them running small home-based businesses — it has been a source of independent income, community, and identity.

You cannot tell someone to find a new livelihood in thirty days. You cannot tell them to “be connected with your upline manager” and call that a transition plan. The email reads like it was written by someone who has never had to explain to their children why the family business suddenly has a countdown timer on it.

Déjà Vu

Reading this notice gave me the same feeling I had in December 2024: the sense that a company I trusted was asking me to smile while it took something away. The phrasing is warmer this time — “genuinely excited,” “exciting future ahead” — but the substance is the same. The consultant relationship is being terminated. The business model is being upended. And the people who built that business are expected to adapt on a timeline that suits the company, not themselves.

I do not know what the “new business model” looks like. Maybe it will be better. Maybe it will cut out the independent consultant layer entirely and move to direct retail or e-commerce. If so, the people who did the groundwork — the home parties, the customer demos, the warranty claims — deserve more than a thirty-day heads-up and a promise of excitement.

My Take

I am not a lawyer, and I am not looking to start a fight with a multinational. But I have been through this once already, and I know what it feels like when the corporate music stops and you are the one left holding the stock.

If you are a Tupperware Malaysia consultant reading this: document everything. Count your inventory. Screenshot your agreements. Start talking to your customers now about what happens after 1 July. Do not wait for the “Transition Guideline” that may or may not answer your actual questions.

And if Tupperware Brands Malaysia is serious about honouring the trust people have placed in them, they should answer one simple question clearly and publicly: what exactly happens to the independent consultants after 1 July?

Because thirty days of “business as usual” is not a plan. It is a countdown.

—

I am a former Tupperware distributor based in Singapore. I ran a Tupperware-focused e-commerce business for over a decade. These views are my own, based on my personal experience and the communications I have received. I have no ongoing commercial relationship with Tupperware Brands Malaysia or Tupperware Brands Singapore.

This AirTag AA Battery Extender Is Ridiculous, Useful, and Mathematically Kind of Brilliant

18 May 2026 Howard Toh

I unboxed one of those AirTag accessories that sounds slightly ridiculous until you think about the use case properly: an Apple AirTag enclosure replacement that runs on 2 AA batteries instead of the usual CR2032 coin cell.

And yes, I know. It makes the AirTag bigger. This is not the sleek little disc you hide elegantly in a wallet. This is the version you chuck into luggage, cable-tie to a kick scooter, or throw into a laptop bag and then forget about until Future You needs it. Honestly, Future You deserves nice things.

Unboxed AirTag AA battery extender with AA batteries, shell, screws, tool, and mounting accessories — The unboxed kit: enclosure, AA battery compartment, screws, tool, adhesive bits, and the usual small parts designed to disappear if you sneeze.

What this thing actually is

The product is basically a rugged AirTag enclosure that replaces the normal button-cell battery setup with a larger battery compartment for two AA batteries. The packaging claims waterproofing, AA battery support, and more flexible mounting options.

Retail packaging for an ultra-long battery life extender for Apple AirTag using AA batteries — The box calls it an ultra-long battery life extender for AirTag. Big claim, but the battery math is not nonsense.

The appeal is simple: AirTags are brilliant until you need to keep replacing CR2032 cells. Apple’s official claim is “more than a year” of battery life, but real-world use can be shorter, especially if you make the AirTag play sounds often. I have seen people mention closer to 6-12 months depending on usage, which is fine for keys, less fine for things you don’t want to keep opening up.

The battery math, because of course I did the battery math

A typical CR2032 coin cell is around 220-240 mAh at 3V. Let’s use 235 mAh as a reasonable middle number.

A decent AA lithium battery can be around 3000 mAh at 1.5V. Two AA batteries in series give you roughly 3V, which matches the AirTag’s expected voltage range better than one AA alone. When batteries are in series, voltage adds, but capacity in mAh stays roughly the same.

So the simplified comparison looks like this:

CR2032: about 235 mAh at 3V
2x AA lithium in series: about 3000 mAh at 3V
Capacity ratio: 3000 / 235 = about 12.8x

If Apple says the AirTag can last about 12 months on a CR2032, then the very optimistic theoretical number becomes:

12 months x 12.8 = 153.6 months, or about 12.8 years.

That is the “spreadsheet is feeling generous” number. Real life will be worse because batteries have self-discharge, voltage curves are messy, contact resistance exists, weather matters, and electronics never read your calculations before disappointing you. But even if we haircut that down quite aggressively, a claim of just over 10 years theoretically is not crazy when using good lithium AA batteries.

With alkaline AA batteries, the numbers can still be much better than CR2032, but I would be more cautious. Alkalines are cheaper, but they are also more likely to leak if left alone for years. And if this thing is going into luggage or a bag you don’t inspect often, battery leakage is exactly the sort of quiet betrayal that ruins your day later.

Use lithium AA batteries if you can

My practical advice: if you are buying this for long-term placement, use good AA batteries, preferably lithium. The whole point of the product is to stop thinking about the battery. Saving a few dollars on bargain-bin alkalines and then discovering battery leak gunk in your tracker years later feels like losing at a game nobody told you was running.

Where I would actually use this

Two assembled black AirTag AA battery extender enclosures with keyrings attached — Fully assembled, it is definitely no longer tiny. But for luggage, scooters, and bags, that is not really the point.

This is not for every AirTag use case. I would not put this in a slim wallet. I probably would not use it on keys unless I wanted my keychain to look like it had a side job.

But for these, I get it:

Checked luggage
Cabin bags
Kick scooters
Laptop bags
Tool bags
Storage boxes you only touch once in a while

Basically, anything where size is less important than “please keep working without making me remember another tiny battery purchase”.

The trade-off

The trade-off is obvious: it makes the AirTag much bulkier. But that bulk buys you a much larger energy reserve, better mounting options, and less battery anxiety. For luggage and gear tracking, that is a trade I can live with.

Would I use this for every AirTag? No. Would I use it for the AirTag I intend to forget inside a bag for a very long time? Absolutely.

View the AirTag AA battery extender on Shopee

Affiliate note: some links may be affiliate links. If you buy through them, I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. This helps fund the very serious scientific pursuit of buying oddly useful things and then doing battery math on them.

When Old Melodies Meet: Mixing 張洪量’s Classics

17 July 2025 Howard Toh

Discovering a Familiar Sound

Recently, as I was listening to 張洪量’s “心爱妹妹的眼睛,” something about the melody struck me as oddly familiar. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d heard those chords before, and after a few repeats, it finally clicked—the chord progression was the same as another 张洪量 classic, “你知道我在等你吗.”

Both songs have that signature C–Am–F–G chord progression running through most of their verses and choruses. It’s a classic progression, but I was surprised at how closely the two songs mirrored each other, not just in mood but also in musical structure.

A Mashup Idea Is Born

Once I noticed this, I was curious: what if these two songs weren’t just similar, but actually mixed together? Could I blend their vocals or melodies and make them feel like a single new song?

So I decided to give it a go. I fired up GarageBand, brought in both tracks, and started tinkering. There was one big difference between the two: “心爱妹妹的眼睛” is noticeably slower than “你知道我在等你吗.” To get them to fit together, I had to adjust the tempo of “心爱妹妹的眼睛” so it would match up rhythmically. With a bit of slicing, synchronizing, and some patience, the mix began to take shape.

The Mixing Process

I used the instrumental/backing track from “你知道我在等你吗” as the foundation, then overlaid elements from “心爱妹妹的眼睛.” Surprisingly, everything fit together beautifully once the tempos were synced. The magic of a shared chord progression brought the melodies together smoothly, and I was able to create a blend that retained the spirit of both originals.

What I love most about this experiment is how it highlights the underlying connections in music—sometimes, songs we think are completely different are actually built on the same musical foundations. All it takes is a bit of curiosity (and maybe a DAW like GarageBand) to uncover those links.

Listen and Let Me Know Your Thoughts!

I put the finished mashup on YouTube for fun. If you’re a 張洪量 fan, or just enjoy clever musical experiments, give it a listen! I’d love to hear what you think, and whether you know of other songs that secretly share the same DNA.