Lends

How might we reduce waste and overconsumption through facilitating lending and borrowing of common household items amongst localized communities?

The idea here, is an app where people within a neighbourhood, borough, residential building, or town can share—and create schedules for regular borrowing or sharing—of common household items so that not everybody needs to buy or own things they don’t use every day.

There’s emerging market potential for something like this due to a shift towards more of a sharing economy, circularity, and greener less wasteful climate-friendly consumer behaviour.

So in order to explain as quickly as i can what this is actually all about i’m going to tell a little story of sorts:

Imagine a suburban street with five or ten households and each one of these households has a lawnmower. And each lawnmower is maybe used for 30 minutes or so a week on average and spends the majority of its life in a garage or in a shed not being used.

Now, let’s think about where each one of these garage-bound lawnmowers came from.

They start with various raw resources that are extracted from the earth, using a bunch of energy and other resources to do so and then packaged and transported to various processing plants using even more energy.

Then what is processed is re-packaged and transported—sometimes across a continent or even across the world—to another processing plant to be turned into the various parts of this lawnmower, again, using more energy. And then those various pieces are packaged once again and transported once again to another location—again, possibly in another far away place in the world—and assembled into what we would call a lawnmower and then packaged again and then transported to a warehouse somewhere where it is then later transported once again to a retailer to be sold to the consumer in which it is then transported to their home.

It should be mentioned that all the packaging in every step of this process is itself made from raw resources extracted from the earth that are also processed in various places and transported and all the transportation in this entire process requires vehicles that not only use energy in the transportation process but also have a massive footprint in terms of their manufacture and resource extraction.

And of course every factory, office, and warehouse along the way also requires large amounts of energy and creates its own waste.

So this entire process uses tonnes of energy and creates tonnes of waste and all for a product that will most likely spend most of its time sitting in a garage not being used at all.

Now, that is obviously not only wasteful of energy and resources, damaging to the environment, and contributing to mass amounts of carbon being pumped into the atmosphere but also not even really all that efficient when you consider the actual end results.

Now realize that there are a lot of consumer products that are produced the same way and follow similar fates. Add in things like planned obsolescence or products being made to break down faster and we have a very damaging wasteful inefficient situation that most people aren’t really all that aware they are participating in throughout their day to day lives.

Now, imagine an app where neighbours on the street could schedule shared use of something like a lawnmower.