First the EU came for the iPhone charging port, now it's coming for unnecessary CPU packaging — stock coolers may be a thing of the past

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Recently passed legislation gives an 18-month grace period but after that, all products in all sectors will need lesser, and more sustainable packaging

AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D retail box held in front of a blue cloudy sky
CPU packaging has already been reduced a lot in recent years, but it'll probably keep on going thanks to new regulations in the EU. (Image credit: Ben Wilson | Windows Central)

Ah, EU regulations. Some love them, some, namely non-EU countries and businesses, tend to loathe them. Nevertheless, they exist, and the latest one will affect, among other products, those wonderful display boxes CPUs have shipped in over the years.

The Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR) came into effect on February 11 (via TechPowerUp) with the aim to reduce unnecessary and non-sustainable packaging. For CPUs specifically, that probably means even the current boxes will continue to shrink. After all, a CPU isn't very big, is it?

Curiously, some are leaning towards the in-box stock cooler becoming a relic of the past, too.

It's a fair assumption to make. If the wording stresses that packaging weight and volume needs to come down, would including a stock cooler fall foul of this? After all, you're not buying the cooler, you're buying the CPU inside.

If the stock cooler were to completely go away, I don't think it would be a particularly big deal. The higher-end CPUs from Intel and AMD have already been shipping this way for a little while now. Truthfully, even if you're building a budget PC, if you're building one you're still better off getting a third-party cooler, anyway.

What it will mean is the death of any special edition packaging. It'll likely get to a point where the box is little bigger than the CPU tray. Hell, the box my RTX 4090 Founders Edition review unit came in would probably fall foul, too.

PC hardware companies have been extremely good at shifting to more sustainable packaging in recent years. (Image credit: Windows Central | Ben Wilson)

Packaging will also, not surprisingly, need to be composed of a percentage of recycled materials by 2030 and 2040, as well as being restricted on single-use plastics.

The PC industry has actually been pretty forward-thinking in the last few years, so it's unlikely this will cause any furore. The likes of Acer and Razer, in particular, have really been pushing environmentally friendly packaging, and there are multiple examples of how the boxes your hardware comes in can be reused as an accessory.

It's a good step that I'm not totally convinced the tech industry necessarily needed regulations on compared to, well, a lot of others, but nevertheless, it now exists.

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Richard Devine
Richard Devine
Managing Editor - Tech, Reviews

Richard Devine is a Managing Editor at Windows Central with over a decade of experience. A former Project Manager and long-term tech addict, he joined Mobile Nations in 2011 and has been found on Android Central and iMore as well as Windows Central. Currently, you'll find him steering the site's coverage of all manner of PC hardware and reviews. Find him on Mastodon at mstdn.social/@richdevine

1 Comment Comment from the forums
  • GraniteStateColin
    I like the title. It points out the problem with government interference in these markets. Sure, maybe most of us prefer USB-C, but by denying Apple the right to make the product it wants to make and leaving it up to customers and marketplace to decide if they want to buy it, where does it stop? Who gets to choose? Will there still be innovation, or has the EU effectively decreed that USB-C is the last connector by denying competition to see if something else rises to the top?

    For most PC's I've built for family members, they're not for gaming and stock coolers have been fine. I wouldn't use a stock cooler on a gaming PC, but if it's just going to do some light browsing, notes in OneNote and some Excel work around tax time? Sure, the stock cooler is plenty.

    By banning included CPU accessories, it creates more work and raises system costs for those who don't need a third-party cooler. If it mattered to the market, then there would already be a competitive advantage to leaving that stuff out (and some SKUs did). Or, maybe it reflects that there is more than one customer preference in the marketplace. Shocker: not everyone has to want the same thing. Diversity in options is a good thing.

    Not only does having multiple options allow different vendors to satisfy different customers' preferences, like evolution leading to creatures to fill different environmental niches, it also inspires innovation and clever solutions. What starts as niche product only serving a small group of customers may later morph into something broadly appealing. Competition and experimentation drives that.

    E.g., most mobile phone users had no interest in smartphones in the early 2000's. A few of us used Palm phones or Windows phones or Blackberries or even Nokia Symbian phones. But then Apple mixed their defining features with the first multi-touch screen and its iPod to create a whole new product category that now nearly everyone uses. If not for Palm's niche device, maybe Apple never would have done that.

    Or another example: VHS beat betamax in spite of its better picture quality for VCR tapes back in the day. But, the failure of betamax still highlighted the problems with VHS in the area of video quality, which helped drive subsequent interest in DVDs. If government had stepped in and stomped out betamax in the name of enforcing a standard, it may have been a longer and more expensive transition to DVDs, Netflix, and streaming services.

    Governments: stay out of it. You can't help. You can only slow down and break things.
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