European Union wants to bring back replaceable batteries, but it could cause a lot of troubles for manufacturers
After a recent victory over in the charger standardization discipline, the EU now wants to move even further. The main reason for introducing the USB-C port as mandatory for a wide range of devices was to reduce electronic waste. Our opinion is that it won’t happen, at least not to the extent that EU bureaucrats expected, but we can’t hide the satisfaction caused by Apple’s capitulation, regardless of the fact that we will probably have to wait another two years for an iPhone with a USB-C port.
The latest idea of MEPs is to return replaceable batteries, not only to mobile phones but also to many other electronic devices. Just remember how much longer cell phones lasted when we could simply change the batteries, and some of us even carried spare ones on the trip.
Should we even mention the situations when the batteries would inflate and destroy the entire cell phone?
The EU is now giving manufacturers approximately 3.5 years to adapt production, supply chains, and all other necessary actions to the new regulation, so that changing batteries would be, if not necessarily possible under the direction of the users themselves, then at least much simpler than it’s the case now. Fast charging technologies have further damaged the life of batteries so after about two years their capacity notably drops. There is a large number of users who would continue to use a mobile phone after a year or two, but they decide to buy a new one because changing the battery in the service can take time, and in some cases, the worthwhile is questionable too.
This proposal is just part of an overarching desire to make it easier to fix devices, but also to keep them from being thrown away for trivial reasons like changing the battery.
On the other hand, manufacturers could encounter serious problems here, given that such regulation will most certainly affect the design and the production process in general, so it could very easily happen that devices become even more expensive,
Nevertheless, we hope that the given deadline will be enough to find a suitable solution because the desired outcome is now really in the interest of reducing waste, and also for the users themselves. As for prices, I doubt we have to worry too much, since the last few years we witness their constant increase.
