Guest Blog: Mervyn Bowden – At last the EU finds its niche…
After many years of waiting and watching the EU interfering in all types of markets – producing unnecessary food mountains, attempting to standardise diverse populations, introducing a wobbly currency and waves of completely crazy legislation on unwilling and non-compliant populations, I have to hold up my hands today and congratulate the EU wholeheartedly.
I’m somewhat reluctant to include my praise in the throng of bells pealing across Europe but in one stroke they’ve come up with an idea which will change the world and – in my view – demonstrate their now undoubted leadership in the world of sustainability.
So what have they done that will bring massive benefits for the whole of mankind?
They’ve only announced that there should be a single (just one, unique, standard) design of mobile phone charger in use in Europe by 2017!
That is inspirational and hopefully will set a new trend of standardising the mega-mountains of trash generated by the million and one current varieties.
This in turn will, I’m sure, lead to a complete rationalisation of the mobile phone charger manufacturing industry (in China) and reduce the need for endless landfill disposal of the existing plethora of chargers – though they probably haven’t thought through where the billion + existing ones will end up!
Sorry, I’m being a tad cynical now.
But seriously, can they now start to do a similar job on similar masses of wires cables which sit in a spaghetti-fied scramble behind most TV sets with connections to outdated videos/CD players/satellite boxes, etc?
They could also do a job on all those pieces of kits, many in the energy and control systems world, which will only talk to friendly systems that have the same software.
Perhaps the EU could come up with an “open protocol” forcing systems to communicate in the same language?
This is a whole new world which may even influence the outcome of David Cameron’s much mentioned referendum on EU membership…
Significant mental gymnastics are required to take on board an EU which actually does something useful.
Excitement knows no boundaries.
