You know what is far more eco-friendly than not having to replace batteries on keyboards, mice and touchpads? Cables. Lithium-ion batteries are not necessaril

You know what is far more eco-friendly than not having to replace batteries on keyboards, mice and touchpads? Cables. Lithium-ion batteries are not necessarily clean to manufacture. And, eventually these things are going to end-up in a landfill somewhere. I truly don't understand this push to de-cable keyboards, mice and touchpads that will be attached to something on your desk. Every single one of our workstations, Mac or PC, has cabled keyboards and trackballs. I can't remember one single instance --in decades and hundreds of workstations-- of anyone, including myself, expressing any degree of inconvenience or any problem whatsoever related to cabled input devices. The way I see it, adding batteries --of any kind-- to a device that could very reasonably be plugged in and forgotten about is the exact opposite of eco friendly. The funny part you still have to have cables laying around because there will be a monthly two hour charging ritual --times N devices. At least with disposable batteries one could pop in new batteries and get going. Now, if you forget to charge, you'll have to attach the cable for a couple of hours. My guess is eventually people are going to leave the keyboard and touchpad plugged-in, again negating the reasoning for both non-eco-friendly lithium-ion batteries and wireless. This is a design choice made purely for design and presented with a very twisted justification of eco-friendliness when, in reality, the opposite is true. Outside of a few corner cases cabled devices would do just as well and be far more eco-friendly by a long shot. There are many articles out there on the issues surrounding the production of lithium-ion chemistry cells. Of course, as with anything on the web, it is important to understand the interests and bias behind who publishes the article and why. With that, I grabbed a couple to post the links here. I leave it to the reader to explore further. http://phys.org/news/2014-10-li-ion-batteries-toxic-halogens-environmentally.html http://phys.org/news/2014-10-li-ion-batteries-toxic-halogens... http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/01/19/tesla-motors-dirty-little-secret-is-a-major-proble.aspx http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/01/19/tesla-motor...