How Collaborative Consumption Makes You More Sustainable

Collaborative Consumption is a New – and Age-Old – Concept!

This is a Guest Post written by Alex Delic

Collaborative consumption is a way that we can use our resources more effectively. It’s been theoretically possible for many years, but now several online services are using collaborative consumption to reduce our waste – and save you money at the same time.

Read on to find out why we need collaborative consumption, what it is, and how you can be a part of it!

The Time is NOW to Reduce Waste

Human consumption of natural resources has grown steadily alongside the expansion of our population, but over the last 30 years it has become more and more apparent that we – all 7 billion of us – are living in a way that our planet cannot sustain.

The average North American consumes 90kg of extracted material every single day. We are using 50% more natural resources than we did 30 years ago, and although it’s now more efficient to make money from the Earth’s supplies, we are still using more of them than ever before.

It is clear that we need to make changes both on big, industrial scales, and also in our individual lives.

Eco-movements working to reduce our waste are growing, and soon they will make a big impact on how we consume – but they require the whole planet to be behind them to make it work.

We as individuals need to be more efficient with our resources right now, and need a present incentive to do so.

What Is Collaborative Consumption?

Collaborative consumption – also known as the Sharing Economy – offers a number of ways to reduce your consumption.

Collaborative consumption is the idea that something that is not being used by its owner – be it a spare bed, a car or equipment – can be lent out to people who need it.

It’s a simple idea, but one that has some profound ecological implications, provided there are the right platforms to facilitate it.

A good eco-pioneer of the sharing economy is AirBnB, which facilitates the use of people’s spare beds as places to stay on holiday.

A 2013 study of 8,000 airBnB stays found that sleeping in a spare bedroom or on somebody’s couch is far more ecologically efficient than staying in a hotel. AirBnB guests used 88% less water and reduced energy consumption by 37%.

Car2Go, a platform that allows you to rent cars from people around you, released notes suggesting that 7%-10% of their users had actively decided not to buy a car, opting for rentals instead.

These statistics suggest that, writ large, the idea of collaborative consumption could seriously help save the environment.

Collaborative Consumption – How To Rent from Your Neighbours

Another frontrunner promoting collaborative consumption is the peer-to-peer rental platform Fat Lama. Fat Lama aims to reduce the amount we consume by providing greater access to the tools and equipment that are gathering dust in everyone’s homes.

Compared to AirBnB, which is largely centred on facilitating holidays abroad, this is a more practical case study to consider, as the things being listed are everyday items.

They say that for the 80 million power drills owned in America, the average time they get used is 13 minutes. Renting from Fat Lama essentially solves that problem, reducing the number produced but increasing their usage time.

On that note, Fat Lama was originally conceived by its founders when, during an office renovation in a residential building, they ended up spending over £5,000 on tools they were never going to use past then.

They knew that all the tools they needed were just lying around in other people’s flats. But they had no way to access those resources, and so on that occasion were forced to contribute to the growing backlog of human waste.

Reduce Waste through the Sharing Economy

One of the main things Fat Lama allows to be rented is electronic equipment like drones, computers and high-end cameras. It should be noted that by 2023 we’ll have produced over 52 million tonnes of e-waste, composed of mobiles, TVs, computers and other electronic devices.

Gear-sharing platforms like Fat Lama can help reduce that number significantly by reducing the demand and need for the kit to be produced in a factory.

And it’s not just electronics. You can also rent things like bikes and campervans, and make huge savings on a wide variety of different items!

And by renting peer-to-peer, the amount you consume is reduced more and more as people adopt the concept.

Consume the Greener Way

• In 2013, the office for National Statistics noted that over ten years, household expenditures on physical goods fell from 26% to 21%.
• The head of sustainability of Ikea concluded in 2016 that we have reached ‘peak things’.
• It is reported that over 65% of millenials would rather spend money on an experience than they would own something.

All these quotes and figures are suggesting that more and more people are happier with a more minimalist, experience-driven lifestyle.

Hopefully this is a trend that will be big enough to meaningfully increase our sustainability, both in the long and short term.

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Have you hired a skip? Do you know what happened to your waste? Let me know in the comments below.

Warm regards,

P.S.  Don’t forget to download your free green living handbook “Live Well, Live Green” here.

Related:

• Another way to save money – barter for what you need!
• How to save money on your mobile phone