Comments by "Nigel Johnson" (@nigeljohnson9820) on "EU officials say common charger will help consumers and environment" video.

  1. The greatest contribution to mobile device waste is the design feature of a sealed for life battery. The relatively small service life of the battery effectively defines the life of the product, consigning not only the battery to the rubbish heap, but also the entire product, including its expensive and complex electronics. To claim that is ok because the product will be recycled to extract the raw material it contains, is a smoke screen, as only a small fraction of these raw materials will be successfully recovered, and this takes no account of the energy and polution generated by the process. Battery life is being used to design in obsolescence, so that the manufactures can churn the product and sell more devices. Any argument that this will stifle innovation are felonious. The technological development of mobile technology has reached a plateau, with manufactures trying to justify the purchase of the latest model with ever small incremental improvements. If anything is stifling innovation, it is the drain on the consumers financial resources, which force them to repurchase device functionality they already own in order to keep pace with designed in product obsolescence. In other words, consumers cannot afforded to invest in real new technology devices, offering new functionality, because they must spend their money replacing working electronics that has been made artificially faulty, either by a sealed for life battery failure, or some software upgrade incompatibility. The cost to the economy must be huge, given that these devices are made and imported from the far East, and the electronic waste is exported for "recycling".
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