A universal cellphone charger? Nice idea, even if years late
Tuesday, February 17th, 2009Personally, I must have a dozen chargers from cellphones of Christmas past. I hate throwing them away, even though I’ve yet to find them useful for anything else. So it was with great delight that I heard about attempts to establish — finally — an international standard for cellphone chargers that would prevent unnecessary duplication of electronic crap that ends up in landfills (though I heard Apple and its iPhone is the odd one out). Thankful, car manufacturers seem to have learned from this mess and, apparently, such a standard is accepted for the connectors/cables used to charge up electric cars.
Tyler Hamilton is senior energy reporter and columnist for the Toronto Star, Canada's largest daily newspaper. In addition to this Clean Break blog, Tyler writes a weekly column of the same name that discusses trends, happenings and innovators in the cleantech market. This blog is a personal project started in April 2005. It is not an official blog of the newspaper. Tyler can be reached at tyler@cleanbreak.ca