Saving on waste
A new flagship smartphone by Taiwanese phone company HTC will be sold without a charger in a pioneering bid to cut down on electronic waste.
O2 will trial the pilot for the as-yet unnamed phone, estimates that of the 30m new phones sold annually in the UK, 70 per cent of their buyers already have a compatible charger for the handset. The company has previously said it will phase out new chargers with handsets sold in 2015.
Three years ago, 10 major phone makers including Apple, Nokia and Samsung committed to a voluntary agreement to work towards a universal charger based on a micro USB connector, in an effort to reduce unnecessary waste. The whole plan appears to have been scuppered by Apple which wants to have its own proprietary Lightning charger for its iPhone 5.
Ronan Dunne, O2's chief executive, said that O2 with HTC believed passionately on this issue and it cannot wait for the industry as a whole to join it in this crusade.
“The environmental cost of multiple and redundant chargers is enormous and I believe that, as the mobile phone has become more prevalent, we as retailers and manufacturers have an ever-greater responsibility to be a more sustainable industry," he said.
Published in
Mobiles
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