If we learned to share our useful items and tools again, we'd still get stuff done, but significantly reduce consumption
We’re really enjoying the pithy, practical blogs from the Rapid Transition Alliance, which take examples of best social practice that might help people to speedily transform their consumerist, carbon-heavy lifestyle, as we face our existential climate deadlines.
This one puts into context a phenomena we blogged about a few months ago - community networks for sharing objects and equipment (exemplified by the Library of Things). The RTA blog on sharing does a fabulous job of providing its history, the facts and stats around it, parallel initiatives - it’s well-worth the long read. But below here’s a few highlights:
Sharing is one of the very first things we are taught to do as children, it’s almost the defining difference between being ‘good’ or seen as selfish. But from the moment we become adults the focus quickly shifts in modern economies to everyone having their own things and protecting ‘private property’.
Not only does this exclude people with little money, it leads to a lot of environmentally wasteful over-consumption as households duplicate often underused items. If we shared more in modern life it could cut waste and bring us together. Now a movement is emerging to rediscover the benefits of sharing.
The Share Shed is a library of things in the town of Totnes in the southwest of the UK (also home to the Transition Town network). People can donate useful items to the library – like ladders, drills, carpet cleaners, camping, cooking and gardening equipment, and sewing machines – and others can borrow them for an affordable fee.
This enables locals to borrow items rather than buy them for themselves and then leave them unused in a shed or cupboard for years. The aim is to build a more resourceful community, allowing people to connect with each other and share things they may need just once in a while, helping people to save money, space and resources.
Share Shed was set up in Totnes in April 2017 by the Network of Wellbeing, with the help of Totnes town council and Lottery Fund support. It was inspired by a similar initiative in the UK West country town of Frome, where the sharers had helpfully designed a kit to encourage others to set up sharing schemes.
In April 2019, a report was produced by students studying sustainability at Plymouth University, which reported over 300 items available to be borrowed; over 500 people signing up as members; and over 490 loans, saving up to £25,000 by their members, and avoiding the production of 268kg of plastic and the generation of 7.5 ton of CO2.
Interestingly, the student who led the research became so intrigued he started to work for the library as a volunteer and took the idea back to Spain, where he came from. This is exactly what the Share Shed is about; encouraging the idea of sharing in all ways.
In January 2020, the Share Shed will become the world’s first mobile library of things, piloting an initiative that will be supporting even more people and moving into surrounding small-town rural communities. The team carried out community engagement in the area beforehand to find out more about the demand: what did people want to borrow, at what times, and where was the best place to pick it up from?
There are now over 400 sharing libraries worldwide and more being set up all the time. Movements like this can correct over consumption in an area that is currently a real problem, while putting people back in touch with each other locally, creating social bonds and even friendships. It can also help with informal skills transfer, as people learn from each other how to best use a particular tool.
Other examples quoted in the piece include Plymouth: Borrow Don’t Buy, Edinburgh: Edinburgh Tool Library, Ljubljana: Knjižnica reči, Frome: SHARE:Frome, Berlin: Leila (and here’s a BBC doc), and more here
They also usually provide, at the end of their blog, “lessons for rapid transition”:
Sharing rather than owning things outright not only cuts waste but can strengthen communities by reconnecting people, it also brings the use of things into the reach of people on low incomes who might not be able to afford outright ownership.
The sharing movement also helps build a range of skills within communities which sit at the core of more green economies, to do with repair, maintenance, reuse.
Making a range of items more readily available removes consumerist pressures and dilutes the influence of status driven consumption, which can benefit overall well being and mental health, whilst promoting behaviours such as social interaction and learning which are known to benefit well being and make other pro environmental behaviours more likely. Why buy when you can borrow? “The miracle is this: the more we share, the more we have” (Leonard Nimoy)
More from the blog here. And we would also point you to the blog Shareable, which has much to find if you put “Tools” into their search engine, including 16 Tips to Crowdfund a Tool Library In Your Town.
We’d also point you to Vinay Gupta’s Mattereum Manifesto (blog here), which envisages a digitally-precise distribution and production system - incentivising us to make (and demand) devices that can be multiply used, and designed for repair and upgrade. Imagine tool libraries as the community front end of such a system.