[rschneid]

To play devil's advocate, there was a potentially legitimate complaint about increased weight/size and potential loss of features (Waterproofing, durability, etc) during the earlier stages of these consumer products' existences when requiring these sophisticated features would represent a relatively larger burden on their creating entities.

However now that we've seen the establishment of these consumer systems, I think it's quite fair to begin requiring the corporations making these gadgets to respect the environments in which they were able to flourish while incurring/leveraging many externalized costs. These corporations won't begin to reduce their rate of externalized environmental debts without government regulation until it begins to damage their profit and forecasts, by which point it will be far too late...

Unfortunately, this marketplace has only the illusion of consumer choice because the flagship mobile devices are unilaterally designed by entrenched trillion-dollar companies. Beginning the modularization of these ubiquitous tools through their most environmentally-impactful components seems like an encouraging start to creating a 'real' marketplace for mobile phone technology. As others in this thread have pointed out, this regulation will require infrastructure to be most effectively and can most certainly be screwed up/sabotaged to the point of tragic ineffectiveness but I believe that if there is a place to begin this struggle for consumer freedoms, it is clearly with batteries.