The EU is displaying exactly the kind of political leadership we need in this topic: pro-consumer, pro-environment, and firmly against planned obsolescence. Removable batteries were the industry standard in the early days of mobile phones, and it worked perfectly. We only lost that standard when Apple’s 'walled garden' mindset infected the rest of the industry.
The amount of avoidable e-waste generated since then is unfathomable: We are talking about mountain-sized piles of discarded electronics, much of it exported to Africa and Asia. There, people (often children) burn those pieces to extract the remaining rare earths, inhaling toxic fumes in the process, while the remaining hazardous garbage is buried and left to poison the groundwater. It is an absolute moral failure that our society, and politicians beholden to Big Tech lobbyists, let this go on for so long in the name of pure profit for a few big companies at the expense of everything else.
The amount of avoidable e-waste generated since then is unfathomable: We are talking about mountain-sized piles of discarded electronics, much of it exported to Africa and Asia. There, people (often children) burn those pieces to extract the remaining rare earths, inhaling toxic fumes in the process, while the remaining hazardous garbage is buried and left to poison the groundwater. It is an absolute moral failure that our society, and politicians beholden to Big Tech lobbyists, let this go on for so long in the name of pure profit for a few big companies at the expense of everything else.