20 pledges for 2020: Dear Santa, no new tech please, we’re over it

Why we’ll be staying away from the TV aisles this Black Friday… and every day after that.

The Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police hit out at retailers

If there’s a particularly odious phrase in common parlance right now it has to be ‘planned obsolescence’ . 

It describes the idea that items - even of staggering cost - are built to only last so long before we have to chuck them out and start again. It’s a bit of profit-turning wizardry for the big manufacturers of consumer goods - typically tech - and of course its almost impossible to legislate against. 

Paired with the careful stoking of the view that we are nothing as human beings if our current phone is last year’s model, even if we can’t even tell you what the difference is, and it is a retail force to be reckoned with - one that is driving our tech throwaways to ever scarier heights.   

The UK is one of the largest producers of household e-waste in the world.

Unwanted electrical items - whether it’s a discarded hairdryer, children’s toy, old PC or TV or any one of a thousand smaller gadgets that we absolutely had to have at the time, including all the cords and plugs and wires - leach some pretty nasty substances like lead and mercury when they’re dumped in landfill.

Meanwhile, efforts to recycle our tech are often simply outsourced to regions of the world where the safety of those people - often including children - doing the dangerous but meticulous job of processing it all for the precious metals and other components is often lapse.

But it just keeps coming. Even by 2017 there were almost 80 million mobile phones in the UK - for a population, including babies and small children, of only 66 million. 

As Black Friday and Christmas approach, our overall spending may be down this year for obvious reasons but the wish list is, surveys suggest, dominated by tech. 

Which is why our newest eco swap find was perfectly timed. 

As the very latest in smartphone tech arrived on our shores to much fanfare though, thankfully, not the pre-Covid scenes of the first buyer skipping through the crowds cheering and clapping as if he had come up with the 100 per cent effective vaccine rather than, erm, bought something, we ignored it as usual. 

That has always been easier for me than my husband, who loves a bit of sleek tech and whose phone had smashed to smithereens the day before. He jumped on a site we use to find refurbished tech if we ever really truly need to replace something and after swimming around for a bit whooped audibly. 

“This is cool,” he whispered in awe, jabbing at the screen. An engineer by trade, he’d found his dream phone - one that you could pull apart and fix. It was a great find, especially when he kept trawling and came up with a rare second hand one at a third of the price of the latest "must have" (That’s the whole point, you don’t throw them away and go for an upgrade - you don’t need to.)

But it also highlighted how far from reality we have strayed as a consuming populous that a feature that should be so fundamental to all good design in the 21st century was such a rarity. 

So Father Christmas, if you’re listening, for God’s sake don’t bring us shiny new tech this Christmas. We just don’t need or want it.