Why you need to unplug your charger

You might wonder why your charger doesn’t have an off switch. Turning a charger off completely – so that is uses zero watts - can be only done using a hard switch. For safety reasons, we would have to put this switch on the charger block itself (the bit that plugs into the wall) not on the cable. It would be just as easy to unplug the charger as it would be to use this switch.

If, instead of a hard switch, we were to use an electrical switch there would always be some component connected to mains. So, although you might think you’d switched your charger off, it’s really on a kind of standby and could still be using around 20mW.

So that’s why we don’t put an on/off switch on our chargers at the moment. Instead, we encourage people to pledge to unplug their chargers, and incorporate reminders in our new phones.

We could make a charger that cuts out when the phone is full, but we’d need to add a lot of components to the charger to make it work. The environmental impact of doing this - in terms of the materials we would use and the energy it would take to produce them - would cancel out the benefits.

Also, as in the case of the on/off switch, it could mean the charger was still consuming energy when you thought it was off.

We’re working on finding a long term, sustainable solution and are testing and developing new technologies all the time.

Until then, we’ll keep making our chargers as efficient as possible, reducing the energy they consume, and encouraging people to unplug them when their phones are fully charged.