It could be a case of one charger to rule them all if the EU presses on with plans to cut waste in the electronic goods market.

Draft rules written over Christmas by MEPs would oblige mobile phone manufacturers to provide a common battery charger.

The provisional agreement needs to be adopted formally by all member states as well as the EU’s Internal Market committee.

The move is part of a bigger deal on radio equipment and will probably be voted on in March 2014. EU countries will have two years to put the rules into their national law and manufacturers will have an additional year to comply.

Some telecoms firms are already aware of how wasteful multiple chargers can be: in 2012, O2 announced plans to sell a smartphone without a charger.