Over time, Christmas has quietly become upgrade season for our screens. New laptops, phones and tablets are some of the most popular gifts. However, it locks in a huge amount of future e-waste and ramps up the demand for fresh raw materials just when the planet can least afford it.

To put this into perspective, globally, we generated around 62 million tonnes of e-waste in 2022, and we are on course to reach 82 million tonnes by 2030 if current trends continue. Less than a quarter of that waste is properly collected and recycled, meaning most discarded electronics end up dumped, burned or handled in informal conditions.

The general public are at the forefront of this as consumers, as we average 6kg of e-waste per person per year, a value of £47.3 billion in recoverable materials. The UK is one of the biggest contributors to e-waste globally which is easy to see with multiple TVs, smart speakers, games consoles and mobile devices being present in a single household.

That is the baseline before we even talk about Christmas.

During the Black Friday to Christmas period our tech consumption spikes. Research for the Recycle Your Electricals campaign found that UK households bought nearly 40 million electrical items in this short window alone, and created about 4.2 million “unwanted” electricals at the same time – a mix of gifts that were never really wanted and older items displaced by a new kit.

Most of that impact comes from extracting and processing metals and making highly complex components, not from charging or using the device.

Laptops are even more material-intensive. Life-cycle assessments suggest that making a single laptop can involve hundreds of kilograms of raw materials, with some analyses estimating up to around 680kg of extracted raw materials once you include everything in the supply chain.

Extending the life of a phone or laptop by even a year or two, on the other hand spreads that upfront footprint over a longer period and is one of the most powerful ways to cut its environmental impact.

In the UK, research by Material Focus shows households are now hoarding about 880 million unused electrical items, roughly 30 per household. Many of those are exactly the kinds of gadgets we replace at Christmas: phones, laptops, tablets and other IT equipment. So, the pattern around Christmas looks like this: we buy new core devices, the old ones become clutter or literal rubbish, and the system only recovers a small fraction of the metals and components we have just paid the planet to produce.

None of this means we have to ban gadgets from Christmas. Phones, laptops and tablets are genuinely useful gifts, and for many people they are essential tools for work, study and staying connected. What does need to change is how we handle the upgrade cycle that has grown up around the festive season.

For a start, the most sustainable device is usually the one you already own. Given that production dominates the footprint of smartphones and laptops, keeping them in service for longer – perhaps with a battery replacement or repair, rather than a full upgrade – is a serious climate action in itself.

It is not just on the consumer however, a recent example being Microsoft discontinuing security support for Windows 10 without a subscription, pretty much dooming the estimated 500 million devices that are unable to be upgraded to Windows 11, devices that are fully functional for those that don’t need the absolute latest operating system. Devices such as these are often available for a bargain price as many see them as obsolete while their use for places such as school and light personal use can help the device reach it’s natural end of life before recycling.

When a new device really is needed, pairing every Christmas purchase with a clear plan for the old model makes a huge difference. Trade-in schemes, refurbished resales and donation routes mean older laptops, phones and tablets can be wiped, refurbished and used by someone else instead of sitting idle. In the UK, Recycle Your Electricals and similar initiatives list local options for selling, donating, repairing or responsibly recycling anything with a plug, cable or battery.

And when a device genuinely reaches the end of it’s life, it should go to a proper e-waste collection point, not into the household bin. That is where the metals and components stand a chance of being recovered and fed back into new products rather than mined all over again.

If December is when we bring new tech into our homes, January can be when we move old tech on – by repairing where possible, re-homing what still works and recycling what truly does not.

The devices unwrapped this year will eventually become part of the e-waste statistics. So, ask yourself before buying that sparkly new iPhone 17 Pro, is this a necessary upgrade? Or does my current phone just need a new battery? At the end of the day, we all like the newest thing, and if you must get it, just ensure your previous device is traded-in or recycled responsibly, you will often get money for your device if it still functions. You win, the trade-in company wins and the environment wins.