That's the whole point: they cannot. You guys are missing the problem here. The exact same systems and people who made the bad decisions about masks and vaccines are the ones making the decisions about phone chargers.
You can't say well obviously that decision was bad, but this one is good. Some of us recall that when the EU was writing blank cheques to Pfizer as part of a collective scheme to do purchasing for all of Europe it was being widely hailed as a genius move. So much money saved! So efficient, to do bulk purchasing. Now every single reply to my post admits that the decisions were terrible but this time it'll be different because this time the decision is obviously right.
Give it some years and people will be pointing to the USB-C decision as an example of EU dysfunction and HNs will be replying, "just because that decision was bad doesn't mean this one is!".
Sure, burning warehouses full of covid masks is absurdly wasteful. But do they really drop to zero effectiveness on their expiration date? Experience says no. If they're not fit to surgical standard, maybe they can be stamped with some identifying mark and redistributed as dust masks or something. The main reason the default option is to burn them is because history suggests that otherwise businesses will buy them and resell them as medical-grade or whatever without fully informing prospective customers.
Do you have a proposal for dealing with commercial mendacity that's less severe than just abolishing all state efforts at procurement or establishment of consumer standards?
I absolutely can and will say that.
A football manager can make bad decisions and lose 5-0, and yet the same manager can then win the next game with the same team. Furthermore, in the case of the EU, these are not even the same people, context, or decision.
It's like when people claim standardized air port codes are made by the same people who sit in the security council, because both are UN bodies. It doesn't make it any more true.
https://www.aerzteblatt.de/nachrichten/142097/116-Millionen-...
As of the end of February, the federal government had around 116 million doses of corona vaccine in stock. This emerges from a response from the Federal Ministry of Health ( BMG ) to a request from AfD member of the Bundestag Thomas Dietz.
According to this, the delivery of almost 111 million more vials with a value of around 2.5 billion euros is still pending. According to the reply, the federal government is obliged to accept them under the EU treaties.
"In view of the current development of the pandemic, the Federal Government is committed to making these EU contracts more flexible," the letter continues.
But even that that wasn't enough trash! Germany decided that it was also needed to purchase over 3.7 billion masks for their federal inventory. But masks expire, and now they have so many expiring and useless masks nobody wants that they have resorted to mass incineration of them, which they call "thermal reprocessing".
Yet even that wasn't enough trash pointlessly manufactured and then immediately burned for the EU. Even as they literally set fire to mountains of masks they were simultaneously purchasing another ~250 million for a National Reserve, many of which will expire at the end of 2023.
This is the EU that claims to care about the terrible trash problem created by mobile phone chargers.