Remember how in 2009 cell phone manufacturers (except Apple) adopted a universal standard that used microUSB ports to charge phones instead of a smattering of annoyingly-different ones? We do, and are very grateful that today forgetting a charger at home isn’t the end of the world, because we can simply borrow a colleague’s regardless of the phone they’re using.

Well, something similar is about to happen to notebooks, thanks to a new standard published by the International Electrotechnical Commission called Technical Specification 62700. The standard was announced on the official IEC website, under the headline “Major milestone: single charger for notebook computers will significantly reduce e-waste”.

The IEC estimates that the large number of chargers for consumer electronics leads to around 500 000 tons of e-waste being generated each year, partly owing to the discarding of still-useful notebooks due to broken or lost chargers. The IEC believes that whittling the number of notebook chargers down to just one “will also make it much easier for external  chargers to be reused or replaced when needed.”

Technical Specification 62700 is not a very sexy-sounding name (that’s what happens when engineers name things), but that’s okay because it’s probably not going to be how we refer to the technology by the time consumer notebooks that use it go on sale.

Of course, the last obstacle to the standard’s widespread adoption is notebook manufacturers, as they need to get on board with the idea and use it in their notebooks going forward. So far, there is no word yet from the IEC on whether this is happening or not, or even which manufacturers are actively considering the idea.

Fingers crossed that we’ll see notebooks with universal chargers arrive on store shelves sometime next year.

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