
Those will now need to be packed and shipped separately from the phones, thereby increasing the environmental consequences. People may use what they have available at home, but many will still buy adapters from Apple. The lack of a charging adapter in the box doesn't mean people won't need them anymore, Kuehr says. At the maximum, you could probably say it's 25,000 metric tons, or 0.05 percent of the total e-waste increase annually." If you consider only Apple's portion, it's probably half or less. "This makes up roughly 54,000 metric tons of e-waste generated. "The percentage of chargers coming from tablets, smartphones, et cetera is 0.1 percent of the total e-waste increase," he said. Yet Kuehr says it's important to put the impact of the removal of the charger and EarPods from the latest iPhones and Apple Watches into perspective. "Taken all together, the changes we’ve made for iPhone 12 cut over 2 million metric tons of carbon annually it’s like removing 450,000 cars from roads every year." Jackson claims that Apple can fit up to 70 percent more products on a shipping pallet. With fewer items included, the iPhone's packaging is smaller. We're removing these items from the iPhone box, which reduces carbon emissions and avoids the mining and use of precious materials." "There are also over 2 billion Apple power adapters out there in the world, and that's not counting the billions of third-party adapters.

"Customers already have over 700 million Lightning headphones, and many customers have moved to a wireless experience," said Lisa Jackson, vice president of environment, policy, and social initiatives at Apple, during Tuesday's iPhone launch event. The company's reasons are straightforward. A charging cable is included (USB-C to Lightning cable for the iPhone 12), but Apple wants buyers to supply their own charging bricks to plug into the wall. It's the same with the Apple Watches that debuted last month. Apple's newest iPhone comes with no charging adapter or EarPods in the box.
