A bride-to-be drew ire recently over a TikTok video in which she showed off her favorite wedding favors: single-use battery chargers that one commenter called "a box of direct pollution."
The original video came from TikTokers Miles and Toni (@newlynorton), but was shared on r/Anticonsumption. This subreddit is dedicated to minimizing waste and pointless spending, and it's common for users to call out the misuse of resources.
In the original video, Toni shows off a box full of small blue packets.
@newlynorton Click the link in the bio for our entire vendor list and click come to our wedding so you can stay up-to-date #newlynorton ♬ original sound - FineFitFitness
"These are individual one-time-use battery chargers," she explains. "We feel like our wedding is going to be like super lit. People obviously are going to want to keep their phones charged."
The charger packaging says that the devices can charge both iPhones and Androids.
ZDNET reports that disposable battery chargers have almost all the same components as small rechargeable batteries. However, they don't have the circuits necessary to recharge them.
According to ZDNET, it would cost manufacturers only a few cents to add that circuit and turn a disposable charger into a reusable power bank, giving buyers a much more useful product and saving them money. While it's understandable on some level to want to give wedding guests a novel way to keep their phones charged at the event, single-use chargers are useless once they're used up and can only be thrown away — putting toxic battery components into landfills.
In the Reddit post about the issue, the original poster was extremely frustrated. "The whole concept here is galling," they wrote. "What a waste of money and materials, not to mention the packaging, and you just know they aren't going to be disposed of correctly and will find their way to a landfill (at best)."
Commenters agreed. "Those should be illegal, and probably are in most countries," said one user.
Another Redditor replied, "I 100% agree. Honestly, planned obsolescence as a whole should be outlawed in my opinion."
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