There's a problem - waste and people aren't solving it. So the government is trying.

Surely there are better ways than mandating a very specific technology.

It would be like building codes mandating the use of a very specific concrete mix instead of mandating that supporting members must be able to handle total expected load with a safety factor of 5 or something - I’m not a civil engineer.

This is a very popular industry standard with a well known path for updates – it seems pretty reasonable for the government to simply tell the stragglers to adopt it. Unlike the concrete in your example compatibility is a bigger concern - imagine if you needed special shoes to walk on AppleCrete - and the service lifetime is much shorter so waste is a very reasonable concern.

> the service lifetime is much shorter so waste is a very reasonable concern

Lightning has been around quite a while no? So waste wise Apple isn’t doing too bad.

It's definitely not terrible — microUSB was so fragile that people replaced cables a lot more frequently. My point was simply that if you're talking about concrete, the waste is on a completely different timescale — Lightning cables are pretty durable but even a decade is ages in tech while buildings and sidewalks are expected to last an order of magnitude longer without outside damage.