Burning down the house

Our collective future might be on fire - the very fabric of life on earth being pushed to boiling point - but what can we actually do about it?

I’m sitting drinking my first in-studio coffee of 2025. This is Jan 6th, National Returns Day - I had no idea this event was, just as Black Friday and Cyber Monday are, a named day. The statistics make for bleak reading. At a conservative estimate, around 25% of returns are never processed and end up in landfill, the vendors deeming it too costly to sort and repackage what comes back to them. Of course, part of the ethics of doing business in the first place should mean companies have factored in the costs of this part of the chain, but competition and our changing purchasing habits have outstripped their model. Capitalism drives profit, not ethics. Who cares if we have to pollute in order to maximise returns? Well, we should, and I would imagine most of us already do. But just as we don’t always link our own footprint and lifestyle together when considering our dietary or transportation choices, we also miss out on other areas where we can radically reduce our impact.

Over the holidays I had a lot of conversations with friends about waste and the sheer quantity of items passing through our houses - “You just have to switch off and go with it.” It’s sad, but to varying degrees that’s what we all do. The truth is, that save for Santa coming to visit the kids - those workplace gifts, the new decorations, the games we will never play again (if we even played them once) - none of it matters. We’ve built systems that survive on this period of overconsumption, systems that are hard to overhaul. Luckily those systems do react most to the very thing they need us consumers for - funding. I did get the feeling this year more than ever before that we were all much more aware of it. Less impulsive purchases, more ethical in the purchases we were making, but then I’m well aware I live in a bubble surrounded by a lot of people who share the same or similar attitudes towards sustainability and ethics. Part of my extremely loose new years resolution is to ramp up my own awareness of this personal waste - whether that’s the things I consume or in this case the things I decide not too. I’ve never really bought a lot of physical things so it’s not the greatest challenge for me personally to change that habit, but for some people that’s a real problem, I get it. I’ve always enjoyed quality over quantity - the best microphone that’s utilitarian and does it all, or that one jacket I’ll wear for a few years. My best friends are all the same. We go down the rabbit hole looking for reviews for even the most mundane items. The method in the madness - I don’t want to have to replace something because I got the wrong version. More waste, buy twice, more hassle, more emissions, more fire, more floods, more death … Over the top? Not really. I mean, it’s a little doomsday, but then we are facing an existential crisis that even the world’s top minds can’t fully predict the severity of. I, as I’m sure so many of you will too, have friends who have either lost their houses in LA this week, or at best are watching the fires come over the hill and holding their breath. The point isn’t that we all consciously made this happen, of course we didn’t. We are however all part of a system that is pushing these large scale weather events to be more frequent and much more damaging. The vast majority of our purchases are unrequired. Stop that chain of consumption and we’re slowing down the mechanisms of capitalism that will continue to push us closer to the brink. 2024, the first year of 1.5 degrees - we’re watching the catastrophe we’re still pondering planning for unfold in real time.

I want belongings that can live with me for years to come. I love good design. My dad has a coffee grinder from the 1980s that’s still doing it’s job. Can you dial in grind size and time like the one in my kitchen? No, but in 40 years time when my grinder will have been superseded by an unimaginable alternative it will still just grind the coffee, albeit marginally better. The difference between the coffee grinder of the 80s and now is that it does actually perform the task better, but like so much of our technology the question is not whether something can do more now, but in the case of most products, that they’re simply made more powerful to perform tasks that aren’t necessarily required. You could argue that none of it is required, but allowing for reality, slowing our consumption and trying to create a circular economy of used items when possible is definitely the more realistically imaginable eco-future. We take from the earth and then pour our non-recyclable waste back into the hole. It’s unrealistic to think that we’ll just stop tomorrow - I know I need to at least entertain a certain amount of tech upgrade in order to stay competitive in making things - but thinking about what I’m doing as much as I can means I can at least minimise those purchases. There are items that we all have and have grown to need, if not always love. Keeping our phones for an extra generation or two means hundreds of millions of items not in landfill and the associated metals and minerals left in the ground. If we don’t buy the phones they won’t be manufactured. I know this is all extremely basic, but it’s worth repeating, if for nothing other than to remind ourselves that it doesn’t have to be this way. Our cars, the same. After switching to an electric vehicle - so long as you use renewables to charge it - you’ve made the emission transition which upgrading unnecessarily might negate. Of course the discarded car isn’t scrapped, it might take another higher emitter off the road down the chain, but the new car isn’t made of fairy dust. Plastic, lots of it. Lithium, kobalt, manganese, aluminium, graphite, copper and steel in the batteries. The truth is that outside of food we need very little to actually survive. We hung around for tens of thousands of years with minimal environmental impact. In the UK we’ve lost half of our biodiversity since the industrial revolution. One in six of the remaining species are deemed at risk. I don’t know the answer, but these are questions we need to be asking ourselves. Nobody is going to do it on our behalf - there’s too much hay to be made.

So this is not a plea to myself to return to an unrealistic life. It’s a reminder that even the most mundane purchases have an impact. Return it and it might never be resold, the associated two way shipping emissions being tallied up for little reason. Instead of burning down the house unconsciously let’s at least slow down the process in order that we might buy the time to think of a solution. I suppose that’s our greatest asset. We might not be the ones who will imagine the technological solutions to the problems we face, but we all have the power to change the course of history with a little thought about how we spend and on what. What is it we actually need?