[mytailorisrich]

Why would making chargers available for free be better for the planet? If people need a charger they can buy one. Offering one for free does not help, and in fact may be worse since that can only increase the number of chargers shipped.

As far as I can see, they stopped including chargers partly because of EU pressure (new law?) that mobile phones should be sold without chargers in order to reduce e-waste because everyone already have a box-load of these at homes. Hence also the push to standardize so that any charger works with any device.

Of course, commercially this allows manufacturers to potentially cut costs while keeping the price of phones the same... But why not, nothing wrong with that.

From an environmental point of view, making people specifically pay for chargers is the best way to make sure they only get the number of chargers they actually need, which fulfils the aim of reducing e-waste.