Buy a phone, whether directly from a manufacturer or from a mobile operator, and chances are it will come with a phone charger. You'll probably plug it in and chuck the old one in a drawer somewhere, "just in case." Once upon a time, when phones were all equipped with their own proprietary chargers, each with an infuriatingly different connector, that would have made sense, too.

But these days, it doesn't. Thanks to European mandates, virtually every phone on the market uses a micro-USB connector and chargers are now interchangeable. Even the iPhone, which doesn't use micro-USB on the handset, can use these standard chargers with a suitable adaptor. As a result, there's no point sticking the old charger in a drawer and plugging in the new one. In fact, there's no point in getting a new charger at all. The old one is just fine.

Since last September, British phone operator O2 has been running an experiment with the HTC One X+ to see if customers really want or need chargers with their phones. The telco shipped the One X+ with a USB cable—but without a charger to connect it to. Anyone wanting a new charger to go with their new phone would have to buy it separately.

The result? 82 percent of customers went without—fewer than one in five buyers of the HTC One X opted to spend the extra for a charger. This surprised even O2, as it expected only 70 percent of customers to do so.

The phone operator is now imploring its British competitors to "take chargers out of the box" and stop bundling free chargers that most people never need. If every UK carrier did the same and if the 82 percent rate were maintained, then some 24 million fewer chargers would be distributed in the UK each year. The company claims that there are 100 million unused chargers as a result of years of this spurious bundling, and because Olympic sized swimming pools are the standard volume metric in all press releases, they say that this is the same as four swimming pools worth of landfill.

The company says that ending the tyranny of unwanted free chargers will go some way toward saving the environment. That it also saves the company money (it's no longer paying for the in-box charger, and can in fact charge customers for buying the separate charger, though it claimed to only charge cost price during its trial) no doubt never entered into its thinking at all.

Of course, if you really want to help the environment, you'd forgo not just the charger, but the whole phone. Stick with the phone you own and you save all the energy and resources that would go into building a new handset and create no more waste for landfill.