Shop until you drop by Ralph Underhill

Shop until you drop by Ralph Underhill

It’s nearly December, which means that we’re bombarded with endless Christmas advertisements which equate happiness with buying anything shiny and new. It’s an exhausting annual reminder of how much consumerism governs our society, and how, in our mindless pursuit of the next new thing, both our wallet and our planet suffers.

Take the poster child of excess consumption, the iPhone. Every year we feverishly seek out the iLatest iModel, seduced by a bigger screen we don’t need, a better camera we don’t use and a glitchy fingerprint reader that we’re all-too-ready to forgive. But because we think we can’t live without it, it gets produced, along with stack of needless CO2 emissions; an unwanted seasonal gift to the world.

So if you want to be kind to your planet this Christmas, why not stick with the phone you’ve got. Like any mobile phone allowing us to communicate from anywhere we happen to be, it’s fundamentally amazing.  And if you need any reminder of just how good your old iPhone 5 is, just remember how it was going to transform your life 12 months ago.