What's Mine is Yours.

I have been reading ALOT of books lately - so be prepared for a whole lot of book reviews coming your way!

I sped my way through What's Mine is Yours - the rise of Collaborative Consumption by Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers.  I can always tell how much I am enjoying a book by how fast I read it and how much I talk about it!  And every time I picked up this book, I walked away with some new knowledge that I was dying to share with another.

The inside flap reads like this..."The recent changes in our economic landscape have notably exposed and intensified a phenomenon: an explosion in sharing, bartering, lending, taxing, renting, gifting, and swapping.  From enormous marketplaces such as eBay and Craiglist to emerging sectors such as peer-to-peer lending (Zopa) and care sharing (Zipcar).  Collaborative Consumption is disrupting outdated modes of business and reinventing not only what we consume, but how we consume.

...While ranging enormously in scale and purpose, these companies and organizations are redefining how goods and services are exchanged, valued, and created - in areas as diverse as finance and travel, agriculture and technology, education and retail.  Traveling among global entrepreneurs and pioneers and exploring rising ventures as well as established companies adapting to these opportunities, the authors outline bold and imaginative ways how Collaborative Consumption may very well change the world."

Basically, I thought the book was fascinating, but I kind of love learning about all the new sharing, bartering, swapping, and lending websites.  I love learning about this idea of collaborative consumption and I really love hearing about how people are way more interested in having ACCESS to something than they are in actually OWNING that something. I would love to live in the age of a sharing culture - so let's get on it people!  Check out the websites listed below and start recycling and swapping some of your old goods for some new goods.

But before I get to the websites, I wanted to share once again some of my favorite bits.  Most of the bits are simply facts and stats - so if you aren't interested in hearing about how much Americans consume or how consumption has changed over the years or how storage units are taking over the world...then simply move right on past.  Trust me I will not be offended!

Bits.


This first one was found straight away in the Intro and it's not really a fact, just an interesting statement, "Every day people are using Collaborative Consumption - traditional sharing, bartering, lending, renting, gifting, and swapping, redefined through technology and peer communities.  Collaborative Consumption is enabling people to realize the enormous benefits of access to products and services over ownership, and at the same time they can save money, space and time; make new friends and become active citizens once again.  Social networks, smart grids, and real time technologies are also making it possible to leapfrog outdated modes of hyper-consumption and create innovative systems based on shared usage such as bike or car sharing.  These systems provide significant environmental benefits by increasing use efficiency, reducing waste, encouraging the development of better products, and mopping up the surplus created by overproduction and consumption."

And now for some facts...


"Americans are some of the world's worst environmental offenders.  A child born today into a middle-class American family will live to about eighty years old and consume on average 2.5 million liters of water, the wood of 1,000 trees, 21,000 tons of gasoline, 220,000 kilos of steel, and 800,000 watts of electrical energy.  At these rates, the average American child will produce in his or her lifetime twice the environmental impact of a Swedish child, 3 times that of an Italian, 13 times that of a Brazilian, 35 times that of an Indian, and 280 times that of a Haitian.  If everyone on the planet lived like the average American child, we would need five planets to sustain them during their lifetime" (p. 6).

"Think, for a moment, about something you bought that you never ended up using.  An item of clothing you never ended up wearing?  A book you never read?  Some piece of electronic equipment that never even made it out of the box?...We live in a world where our drawers, closets, walk-in wardrobes, attics, garages, sheds, and basements are bloated with mountains of objects we rarely use and forget we even have.  By the early 1990s, American families had, on average, twice as many possessions as they had 25 years earlier.  So much stuff has been bought that it doesn't even fit into our homes anymore, and so we rent storage to extend the capacity to own more things...

Today there are more than 53,000 personal storage facilities - more than 7 times the number of Starbucks  - in the United States.  This amounts to a staggering 2.35 billion square feet or more than 38,000 football fields put together in America alone.  If you put out your arms, you create about 7 square feet around you.  That is roughly how much self-storage space there is for every man, woman, and child in America.  It means every single person in the country could comfortably stand together inside self-storage units.  And self storage is now a $22 billion-per-year industry in the United Sates - surpassing domestic Hollywood box-office sales.  On average you spend more on self-storage than milk, coffee, and even beer" (p. 13).

growth seems driven by our need to have more room to keep more stuff" (p. 15).

These stats make me laugh because when Peter and I were looking at houses to buy a garage WAS obligatory, particularly for storage purposes! And it had to be big enough to fit our car AND our stuff.  Parking on the street just wasn't going to fly with us.  I mean why have a garage if you can't store your car in it simply because your stuff has taken the whole thing over??  So then an oversized garage was the answer, and that is exactly what we found!  And then my laughter simply continues because I am always telling people our house is small - 770 square feet small - and it drives Peter wild!  And now I can't help but think well it was built in 1948, and it certainly wasn't all that small for that time period considering the average house size in 1950 was 983 square feet and that was for a family of 4, not a family of 2.  So I guess it all makes sense.

So the moment you have been waiting for....the websites that are definitely worth perusing.

Airbnb - don't stay at a hotel.  Airbnb is a global network of accommodations offered by locals.  It's more fun and very cheap, especially in the big cities.

Couchsurfing - participate in creating a better world, one couch at a time.  A worldwide network for making connections between travelers and the local communities they visit.  the site matches travelers who want to sleep on a couch for free with people who are willing to serve as temporary host and who have a couch to spare.

Zilok - rent anything!  A leader in the peer-to-peer rental mart

Freecycle - a worldwide online registry that circulates free items for reuse or recycling.

ReUseit - a place where you can purchase reuseables for every part of your life!

U-exchange - trade anything, pay nothing.  U-exchange is the largest swap site that specializes in every type of trade.  No barter currencies or commissions taken on trades.  Contact, post and swap with other members.

Swaptree - the world's largest swap marketplace - trade DVDS, books, games, movies, video games, and MORE!

thredUp - a clothing exchange for kid's clothes

SharedEarth - the largest community garden on the planet!  this site connects gardenless would-be growers with unused spare land

AND if you have made it this far, then it must mean you are slightly interested in all of this so take the time to CHECK OUT the Collaborative Consumption website HERE.