New EU right-to-repair rules make smartphone batteries easy to swap. Why does it matter? Replacing a degraded battery instead of buying a new phone keeps your working hardware alive and saves over 12,000 litres of fresh water.
Have you ever stopped to think about what actually happens when you swap your old phone for a shiny new one? Most of us just think about the cash in our bank account or the extra camera lens.
But the real cost of a new handset is hiding elsewhere. It is buried in the massive amounts of water and energy used to build these small glass rectangles.
Fortunately, things might finally be changing here in Europe.
For years, tech companies made it as difficult as possible to repair our devices. Batteries were glued down tight, parts were paired to specific mainboards, and getting a official spare part was nearly impossible. You were basically forced to buy a new device every two years.
The European Union has had enough of this throwaway culture. Through new regulations like the Right to Repair directive and updated battery rules, Brussels is forcing tech giants to rethink how they design hardware. Tech companies must now make batteries easily replaceable by end users and ensure spare parts remain available for years.
We are already seeing the first effects of this legislation: Amazon is reportedly redesigning its Kindle e-readers to comply with the European Union battery law.
When even giant global platforms have to change their manufacturing habits for the European market, you know the policy is working. But why is this legal shift so important for the environment?
When we talk about environmental impact, we usually focus on carbon emissions or plastic waste. Water consumption is rarely mentioned. Yet, manufacturing electronics requires an extraordinary amount of fresh water.
To give you an idea of how water-intensive this industry is, let us look at what it takes to produce just a single smartphone:
- Massive water volumes: A generic smartphone requires roughly 12,760 litres of water to manufacture. That is equivalent to about 160 full bathtubs.
- Pollution and grey water: Out of the total water footprint, grey water—which is the fresh water needed to dilute pollutants from manufacturing chemicals—accounts for the largest share. For instance, final assembly and component manufacturing alone account for 40% of overall water use, with 95% of that being grey water.
- Heavy land demand: Beside water, producing a single generic smartphone consumes around 18 square metres of land due to mining raw materials and manufacturing packaging.
- Extremely high corporate impact: On a global scale, the smartphone industry used billions of litres of water annually, creating massive pressure on local ecosystems where manufacturing takes place.
Where does all this water go? It goes into mining rare elements like cobalt and lithium, refining metals like copper and gold, and chemical washing during microchip production.
Here is the absurd part of the story. In most smartphones, the lithium-ion battery is the lowest lifespan module. It typically degrades after just 2.5 to 3 years of daily use, completing around 500 charge cycles.
When your phone starts dying by lunchtime, you assume the device is old. But while the battery degrades, the rest of the phone is usually still perfectly functional:
- The printed wiring board (PWB), which carries the main chips, can easily last around 3.5 years or more.
- The display screen and outer cover are designed to last up to 9.5 years.
- The camera sensors and internal connectors rarely wear out on their own.
Yet, because replacing an integrated battery used to be expensive or tricky, millions of people simply throw away perfectly good electronics just because a single two-euro component lost its capacity.
How much water will I save by replacing the battery in my smartphone?
What happens if you replace the battery instead of upgrading the entire phone?
The math is surprisingly simple. The battery represents less than 1% of the total embodied energy and a tiny fraction of the resources needed to create a phone. The printed circuit board and processor, on the other hand, account for 96% of the embodied energy and the vast majority of the water footprint.
If your phone lasts 2.5 years on its original battery, throwing it away means you consume 12,760 litres of water for every 30 months of use.
If you swap the battery at the 2.5-year mark and keep the phone running for another year or two, you extend the lifespan of all those water-intensive internal components.
By delaying the purchase of a new phone by just one or two years, you directly save thousands of litres of fresh water that would have been required to mine, refine, and manufacture a brand-new handset.
Why buy a whole new set of microchips, rare metals, and glass screens when all you need is a fresh pouch of lithium?
The next time your phone battery starts losing charge, do not rush to sign a new contract. Replacing the battery is cheaper for your wallet, and it saves thousands of litres of water from being wasted.
Shouldn’t we demand that every tech maker makes this repair simple for everyone?
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