Environmental benefits of a universal mobile charger and energy-aware survey on current products

More than a billion of new mobile phones are sold yearly, while nearly the same amount of older devices are being disposed, contributing to the e-waste challenge. Furthermore, old chargers, often not compatible with the new phones, are sent to dump too, adding up to the e-waste problem and increasing the costs for the end user. This paper reports an analysis performed on a wide number of mobile charger currently available in the market. In particular, such analysis gives the distribution of: output voltages and currents, type of connectors, efficiency, sizes, weights, etc. trying at same time to highlight the correlations (if present) among such variables and identifying the best available solution. Then, further studies based on LCA will also be presented, with the goal to analyze the mobile charger efficiencies and their related environmental impacts concerning the use phase as well as the manufacturing one. As a conclusion, the paper will provide some suggestions on the main features that a Universal Mobile Charger should have.