In a bid to reduce waste, a proposed regulation would require phones and other small electronics to...
Late last week the European Union proposed a new regulation that would solve this problem by requiring all small electronics to have the same type of charging port.
All such electronics sold in the E.U. would need to switch to the USB-C standard within two years.
"Based on what we know about what's in the electronic waste stream, the relative reduction in the amount of e-waste is probably going to be relatively small due to chargers alone," says Callie Babbitt, a professor of sustainability at Rochester Institute of Technology, where she studies electronic waste.
Households across the U.S. discard about just under two million metric tons of electronics a year.
The challenges associated with electronics that we discard are more related to what it is that we're throwing away.
If you look at the electronics [households] discard in the U.S., by mass, the vast majority of this is things like televisions, computers, printers-because those things are heavy and contain a lot of material and weight.
With standardized components, if you do want to repair or recycle electronics, then all of the parts are the same.
In my lab, we have an enormous bench full of screwdrivers and tools of all different sizes, shapes and types-because that's what's needed to actually access the components inside electronics.
Many U.S. institutions-including, at one point, the federal government, as well as many universities, businesses and municipalities-actually wrote into their own purchasing standards that any electronics bought must have a certain level of certification from the [EPEAT] rating system.
Managing used electronics and electronic waste is incredibly complex, and no single policy will be able to effectively address all of it.