Working from home as I have done since John Austen and I launched Cleanzine almost 23 years ago, I've learnt to compensate for the loss of office banter by having the radio keep me company. I try not to listen to the ads but sometimes I get drawn into them. One thing that has struck me is the number of special deals there are for those wishing to upgrade their mobile phones to the latest model, with more than a billion mobiles produced each year to cope with demand. The deals seem incredibly expensive to me and I can't understand why people bother; particularly when one considers how many hundreds of phones are stolen each day... £50 million-worth reported snatched in London alone during 2024 at the rate of one every eight minutes. Surely having a stand-out, newly released model just adds to the stress? 

  

Something else I don't like is when technology - which we've probably paid a lot of money for, becomes obsolete. I've occasionally hung on to my computers for so long that they've becoming incapable of running the latest software, which has meant I've reluctantly taken them to the recycling centre and replaced them with a new model. But that's down to me and is something of a 'one-off', compared to the estimated 400 million computers likely to be dumped as a result of what’s been described as Microsoft's new 'arbitrary' system requirements for Windows, announced on Tuesday, which will, effectively, make them obsolete. 400 million… What’s that going to do to the environment? Prior to this announcement, the estimates were that there were 347 million tonnes of e-waste on our planet already – a figure expected to grow to 746 million tonnes by 2030. We don’t need Microsoft unnecessarily making things worse, do we? 

  

I looked up arbitrary just to be sure and yes – it’s as damning as I’d first thought. Roget’s Thesaurus describes it as “capricious, erratic, frivolous, inconsistent, irrational, irresponsible and unreasonable”. Why do it then Microsoft? You can read more about the impact of the decision and the issues created by growing amounts of e-waste further down the page, (but be prepared to get angry!). 

  

Fortunately, growing numbers of companies are gearing up to operate more ethically, and many are pushing for tech manufacturers in particular, to make components that are interchangeable so that those with plenty of life left in them, can be removed from otherwise obsolete hardware and used in the latest models. This is the way we simply have to go, if the marketing gurus are going to continue making us believe that unless we’re always showing off the latest technology, we’re somehow inferior to our peers…