Posted by Charlie on 10 February 2012
Consumers who purchase a mobile phone are accustomed to receiving a wall charger free of charge. That expectation may soon begin to shift, thanks to O2's new policy of not supplying a charger every time a customer purchases a new handset.
The move, which some are likely to see as a cost-cutting measure, is intended to improve the sustainability of the mobile phone system in general. In particular, eliminating excess phone chargers will have a positive impact on the environment because fewer such units will need to be manufactured – and fewer will be discarded. The EU has calculated that more than 50,000 tonnes of electronic waste are generated each year solely through the binning of unneeded mobile phone chargers. This works out at more than 13.5 million tonnes of emissions of dangerous greenhouse gases – the very gases though to be responsible for climate change, also known as global warming.
A new charger with every phone might once have been a necessity because there was a lack of interoperability between phones that worked on one network and chargers that originated with phones that worked on another. Even customers who stayed with the same network from phone to phone might have incompatibility issues with previous chargers. However, the European Commission is not trying to implement a ‘universal charger’ strategy in which all chargers would use the same micro-USB connection. This should make O2's ‘no new charger’ policy more workable for consumers.