O2 has started offering the HTC One X+ without a charger two months ago and now it released results of this initiative. The prediction that 70% of customers wouldn’t need an extra charge was wrong – the actual figure is 82%. Yup, four-in-every-five handsets sold without a charger!
The findings pave the way for the carrier to take all chargers out of the box by 2015, and help its goal of eliminating waste of 100 million unused chargers across the UK.
The press release quotes O2’s chief executive Ronan Dunne saying that other mobile operators should follow suit and help customers rely on their existing chargers. According to O2, those 100 million unused chargers are equivalent to a total of 18,700 tones of components (the same weight as 1,000 London buses), or 124,274 miles of copper wire and plastic covering (enough to wrap the O2 Arena 200,000 times), or a volume of landfill equivalent to four Olympic swimming pools if all were thrown away.
We applaud O2 for taking this route and are hoping other carriers will launch similar initiatives soon…