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TECHNOLOGY
I Can’t Decide if This Proposed EU Battery Law Is Right or Wrong
I see issues
The EU has proposed a law that would require batteries in our portable devices to be easily replaced by users. Okay, on the one hand this sounds good. Why should you pay a labor fee to replace a battery?
On the other hand, I see some glitches.
It would make waterproofing much more difficult and likely quite messy.
It would make small devices like watches more bulky or have a shorter battery life.
A bigger issue is that used lithium ion batteries can be dangerous — they can catch fire and you need sand to put it out. Water just makes things worse. It’s nasty enough for that to happen when the battery is inside your device; it’s quite another when you have a bare battery in your hands! People could be very seriously hurt.
Another I see is that it could diminish recycling. There will always be some percentage of jerks who will just toss the used battery. Even offering a core fee won’t dissuade all of them. Do we really want that?
How about instead make the manufacturer offer labor free replacement? You pay only for the battery, they have to put it in. The problem there is that your device may not work after reassembly, which tends to upset people when it happens now and might tick people off even more if this were the law. But it might be better than this proposed law.
I suppose Apple might say that their repair kits meet this need, but I doubt the EU would agree that’s “easy” — and it isn’t.
I don’t know. What do you think?
