The European Parliament voted last week to endorse the legislation which requires that consumers must be able to "easily remove and replace” portable batteries used in devices such as smartphones, tablets, and cameras. The rules will come into force in 2027.
The measures are intended to cut e-waste by increasing the longevity of smartphones by making them more repairable.
A recent global survey conducted by the benchmarking firm DXOMARK, for example, found that the most common reason consumers replaced their smartphones was because the battery didn’t hold its charge anymore.
This because smartphone batteries have been notoriously difficult to remove. The EU wants to change that in the hope that it can help reduce the 150 million smartphones thrown away each year as e-waste.
But in the case of Apple the new rules could force the company into a major redesign given the difficulty of accessing and replacing iPhone batteries.
This is not the first time that the EU has taken aim at tech giants over the issue of e-waste. The European bloc voted last year to introduce a ‘common charger’ law that will make it illegal to sell smartphones containing proprietary charging technology like Apple’s lightning port.