What’s Mine Is Yours (2011)

With a title that even Karl Marx would be slightly embarrassed to print, I had to fight my prejudice that this book would be a socialist manifesto to turn every town into a commune (which contrary to popular belief, I am not wholly in favour of and this is not wholly a book about).  What I found was a refreshing examination of how technology is enabling consumers to create more sustainable forms of consumption and civic life.

Authors Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers make a compelling argument that the emergence of online social networks, a renewed belief in the importance of community, increasing environmental concerns and cost-consciousness are moving us away from a top-heavy, centralised and controlled form of consumerism towards one of sharing, aggregation, openness and cooperation.

If in the twentieth century individuals were defined by credit, advertising and what they owned; this a vision of the twenty-first century in which we will be defined by reputation, by community, by what we can access, how we share and what we give away.

The central thesis is not that we need to pick between owning and sharing, but that the relationship between physical products, individual ownership and self-identity is undergoing profound evolution.  More prosaically: we don’t want the drill; we want the hole.

The Growth of Consumerism

In order to convince us of the controversial position that the consumerism train is out of control, the book goes to some pain to trace consumption trends since the 1950s.  While the depiction of early forms of advertising as being solely to sell liberation to housewives via ownership, and trying to link disposability with convenience, is a little reductive and unnecessary, the book does identify several interesting themes and statistics.

It is advanced that there have been four main forces that have fed hyper-consumption:

• the power of persuasion;
• the buy now, pay later culture;
• the law of life cycles; and
• the ‘just one more’ factor.

In support of these forces we can see that between 1989 and 2007, credit card debt nearly quadrupled, soaring from $238 billion to $937 billion.  This leads to the over-simplistic assertion that the more credit we have, the more stuff we can afford to buy, the more resources are consumed and the more waste is created.

I won’t argue with the logic of this position, only the banality of spelling it out in such painstaking detail.  Nonetheless, it is thought-provoking to note that:

• the average person in America and Britain discards his or her mobile phone within eighteen months of purchase;
• if you ‘upgraded’ to every new iPod that had come onto the market from 2001 to 2009, you would now own eighteen iPods;
• during the twentieth century, the average human lifespan in the U.S. increased by more than thirty years.  In contrast, over the last fifty years, the lifespan of everyday ‘durable’ goods including refrigerators, toasters and washing machines has decreased anywhere between three and seven years; and
• there is now more than sixteen square feet of shopping centre for every man, woman and child in the United States.

We get it.  Since the end of World War II, the Western world has been having a whale of a time buying things we probably don’t need.  Author Douglas Rushkoff enjoys much more philosophical phrasing in his book, Life Inc., when stating “Each home was to be its own fiefdom.  Self-sufficiency was part of the myth of the self-made man, so community property, carpools or sharing of almost any kind became anathema to the suburban aesthetic.”

Waste

But consumption isn’t really the problem; it’s how we make those goods and what we do with after their useful lives that is more troublesome.  Consequently, the following fun/soul-destroying facts are presented in order to highlight the amount of waste generated by modern forms of production and consumption:

• the amount of waste matter generated in the manufacture of a single laptop computer is close to four thousand times its weight;
• in Britain, every man, woman and child in the country combined produces enough waste to refill London’s Royal Albert Hall every two hours;
• according to the EPA, only 30 per cent of this rubbish is recycled or composted, 13 per cent is incinerated, and the other 57 per cent ends up in landfills;
• in 2004 the world crossed the media-loving line, as the average home actually had more televisions than people in it;
• environmental thought leader, Paul Hawken, estimates that for every 100 pounds of products made, 3,200 pounds of waste are produced, a 32-to-1 ratio; and
• most of us retire some fourteen hundred items of clothing before the age of 17.

All of that is seriously staggering (and, if you disagree, I’d suggest you’ve probably just heard this message so many times before that it’s just beginning to sound like white noise).  But the point was mercilessly driven home by revelation of the size and effect of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is the largest landfill in the world.  It’s a floating stew of 3.5 million tonnes of garbage festering within the North Pacific Gyre.  This is a man-made island, 90 per cent of which is plastic (the remaining 10 per cent being chemical sludge and debris), containing everything from bottle caps and toys to shoes, cigarette lighters, toothbrushes, nets, wrappers, takeaway containers and shopping bags from all corners of the world.  It’s an ode to our recklessness.  While the plastic is ‘photo degraded’ by the sun, this only breaks the plastic down into smaller lentil-sized plastic polymers, known as nurdles, that even the most voracious bacteria cannot break down.

We have now reached the point where plastic nurdles, of which there are roughly 5.5 quadrillion in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, outweigh surface plankton six to one in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.  Furthermore, in combination with other patches, these areas now cover a shocking 40 per cent of the sea.  That’s a quarter of the earth’s surface.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a hideous illustration of the way we’ve ignored the negative consequences of modern consumerism.

Collaborative Consumption

Assured now of the size and severity of the task in problem, the authors act with expert timing to introduce of the book’s driving philosophy: Collaborative Consumption (or, as I’ve always thought of it, the “sharing economy”).

Collaborative Consumption includes: sharing, bartering, lending, trading, renting, gifting and swapping, redefined through technology and peer communities.  Its stated aim is to enable people to realise the potential benefits of accessing, not necessarily via owning, all the products and services you could want or need, while at the same time saving money, space and time; making new friends; and becoming active citizens once again (sounds easy enough). 

However, the fact is that social networks, smart grids and real-time technologies are making it possible to leapfrog outdated modes of consumption and create innovative systems based on shared usage.  In time-honoured fashion we’re taking the traditional and antiquated ideas of looking out for each other, being thrifty and caring for what we have, and bring them back to prominence.  In combination, the authors argue that these systems have the potential to provide significant environmental benefits by increasing use efficiency, reducing waste, encouraging the development of better products, and mopping up the surplus created by over-production and –consumption.

To put some meat of this rather skeletal idea, we can identify three distinct Collaborative Consumption Systems (CCSs):

1. Product Service Systems (PSSs)
2. Redistribution Markets
3. Collaborative Lifestyles

Product Service Systems mark a fundamental movement away from the individual ownership and resource lock-up.  Rather than selling a customer a product, the focus is on considering a customer’s use of the product, or the result they wish to obtain, and leasing the product often in combination with providing a service.  A classic example of this is a service like Zipcar, where you can hire a car from any number of widely available parking lots (50% of Londoners are supposed to live within a 5 minute walk of a Zipcar parking lot and the cars are unlocked via your ‘Zipcard’ rather than the car keys), drive for a flexible amount of time and then return the car (all without even talking to another human).  Somebody else is responsible for the financial burden of acquiring and maintaining the asset, and in return for a small payment, the utility of the product is leased as a service.   

The obvious environmental advantage of this system is that an individually owned product with often limited usage is replaced with a shared service that maximises its utility and ensures its maintenance (it is estimated that every car-share vehicle on the road replaces seven to eight owned vehicles, as people decide against owning or buying a second or third vehicle).   Usage PSSs such as this have the potential to disrupt many traditional industries centred on exclusive ownership such as electronics, durables, fashion, appliances, children’s toys and household tools, while also turning on its head the concept of planned or perceived obsolescence.

The authors illustrate that, if you are like most people, you may use a power drill somewhere between six and thirteen minutes in its entire lifetime.  And yet, supposedly half of all US households own their own power drill.  Again, we don’t want the drill; we want the hole.

The second system, Redistribution Markets, harks back to an older mentality that things with utility are not to be thrown away.  Where previously it was time-consuming and potentially expensive to marry the disposer of a particular item with its acquirer, sites like Freecycle and Craigslist are showing how the internet can be used to create vast, decentralised systems of redistribution that are predominantly self-organised and free.

This system has the obvious environmental benefit of decreasing the demand for the manufacture of new products which in turn lowers associated emissions and resource use (plus, I hear “upcycling” is a word that makes hipster females weak at the knees – not that I would know about that).

The third system, Collaborative Lifestyles, is altogether more difficult to define.  Think of it as a catch-all for communities and systems that are developing in order to increase efficiency and utility and more freely distribute the labour required to perform tasks. 

A good example is crowdsourcing, a concept coined by Jeff Howe as the “act of taking a job traditionally performed by an agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call’.  It is now a well-documented phenomenon applied to the creation of collective repositories of content (Wikipedia), products (the T-shirt company Threadless, where all the designs are created by the user community), new business ideas (Proctor & Gamble’s Connect & Development) and even problems such as climate change (MIT’s Climate Collaboratorium).  Here we often see unintended environmental benefits.  Think of how fewer encyclopaedias are printed now that Wikipedia is at our fingertips or how many fewer car or aeroplane journeys need to be taken now that we have so many wonderful work collaboration tools.

Each of the three systems above then generally operates via one or more of the following revenue models: 

• Membership (Zipcar (charges $75 to become a member then $8 per hour) and Bag, Borrow or Steal – a service allowing users to rent designer handbags for the evening)
• Service fees (Airbnb and Zopa – a peer-to-peer lending site)
• Micropayments for usage (BIXI – Montreal’s cycle hire scheme (much like London’s Boris Bikes, Paris’ Velib and Denver’s B-Cycle.  As an aside, in 2014, bike sharing became the fastest-growing form of transportation in the world) and BabyPlays – a toy leasing company)

Where previously these ideas could not achieve the requisite economies of scale to be profitable, due to data sharing, social networks and smart phones we can now match supply and demand through a nearly instantaneous mass synchronisation of wants or needs in which both sides always gain (data protection/”big brother” concerns aside).  Furthermore, we’re distributing the intelligence required to set up these platforms such that these are no longer the exclusive business models of IT experts.  As Thomas Goetz, the executive editor of Wired magazine commented, “Open source is doing for mass innovation what the assembly line did for mass production”.

Consequently, we’re now seeing an explosion of Collaborative Consumption businesses and initiatives that are improving our access to good and services, reconnecting us with our communities and each other, while also reducing our impact on the environment.  Some of my favourites picked out from the book include:

• A programme in the UK called Landshare, and similar schemes in the US such as YardShare, SharedEarth, We-Patch and Urban Gardensphere, that connect gardenless would-be growers with unused spare land, as well as people with extra time or skills who want to help.
• IBM, Xerox, Sony and Dow have banded together to form the Eco-Patent Commons, which releases environmentally beneficial patents to the public domain for anyone to use so long as they have the goal of fostering new innovations and protecting the environment.
• PSSs for solar energy such as Citizenre and SolarCity. Given that it costs anywhere between $20,000 to $40,000 to install a solar panel system on the average home, it’s easy to understand why the price tag dampens interest. Plus, it isn’t the solar panel itself that people covet.  It’s the clean electricity and the immediate cost savings.  These companies tap into this demand by installing, monetising and maintaining solar panels on a customer’s property but retaining ownership of the equipment, absolving homeowners from the stress and costs of getting it fixed or replaced when it breaks down.  These companies also overcome the lament that “it’s too complicated” by handling state and local incentive and rebate programmes.   As Lyndon Rive, CEO of SolarCity, writes, “People want to go green, but they won’t do it if it costs than an arm and a leg.  Even the extreme environmentalists can’t justify it”.
• Toy subscription services such as MiniLodgers, Busy Bee Babies (Scotland) and DimDom (France) took me completely by surprise.  I had failed to consider how quickly children get bored with toys and just how wasteful the buying cycle is.  By leasing toys on demand, not only does it reduce the number of toys a consumer needs to buy, if any, but the usage of one toy is maximised.  Also, these distribution channels become integrated with the product manufacturers themselves.  Consequently, it is in their best interest to make their products as durable as possible to handle multiple users and heavy usage.  And of course this service also prevents the toys children outgrow or don’t use from being thrown away and ending up as landfill, and perhaps becoming another piece of floating plastic in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
• Timblerlands’ Earthkeepers 2.0 footwear is the shoe for life.  It is made of wholly replaceable and customisable component parts.  Rather than buying another pair of walking boots each time they wear out, simply replace the worn segment (perhaps in a new style or colour).  The worn component is then returned to the company who then reuse the materials.

And these ideas aren’t flippant. There are real, positive environmental impacts when compared to the previous methods of consumption.  The authors report that if Netflix members drove to and from the rental store, they would consume 800,000 gallons of petrol and release more than 2.2 million tonnes of CO², emissions annually.  And these numbers are based on Netflix subscription numbers in 2011, when they were still posting DVDs and before the majority of members began to consume their service via online streaming.  Furthermore, a  study conducted by Intel and Microsoft comparing the environmental impact of various forms of music delivery showed that purchasing music digitally reduced the carbon footprint and energy usage associated with delivering music to consumers by 40 to 80 per cent compared with buying a CD at a retail outlet.

Of course, these business models are not without their challenges.  All three systems require two key elements that will be hard to generate.

Critical mass: any system will fail if there aren’t a relatively large number of users compared to the service it is trying to provide.  This is because a large number of users provide a satisfactory level of choice and the convenience that causes the switch from the established alternative.  Systems that don’t achieve critical mass will probably be poorly utilised and short-lived.

Perhaps even more importantly, the whole ethos of Collaborative Consumption is built on Social Capital: the trusts, norms, and networks that can improve the efficiency of society by facilitating by coordinated actions.  If I don’t trust that you will return what you’ve borrowed or that you are looking to cheat the system, then the system itself breaks down.  Fortunately, we have seen a lot of evidence to indicate that peer review systems are an incredibly powerful tool in compelling conformity to the rules of a group.  For any one that’s ever bought something on eBay, or hailed a ride on Uber you implicitly understand that I’m watching you, you’re watching me and that you need to cultivate and maintain your reputation if you want to be a long-term member.  Intuitively, it makes sense that forms of consumption with near-instantaneous cross feedback and review will actually achieve much greater levels of customer satisfaction than more traditional models.

The authors predict that soon there will be a service that aggregates your reputation across all the Collaborative Consumption platforms of which you are a member.  Could a reputational bank account be worth more than your credit score in the future?

Conclusion

Why is it that we spend so much time teaching children how to share their toys nicely but for adults sharing becomes a loaded concept?  We share our roads, parks, schools and other public services, but we draw the line in other areas of our life, such as personal belongings.

One of the problems with Collaborative Consumption is the stigma attached to it.  Do I have less status if I don’t own what I have?  Do I want to share with people I don’t know or like? Do I trust you not to ruin a shared good or service?  How can I trust that things will always be available as and when I want them?

Some of these questions you’ll have to ask yourself.  Others are questions that are going to become increasingly redundant as the technology improves.  What is beyond doubt is that this is happening.  And it’s good for the environment.  And for our communities.

The book itself was not the best text I’ve reviewed on this blog (in fact it borrows a lot from two other books that I’ve already reviewed: Cradle-to-Cradle [link] and Natural Capitalism [link], which were written many years before – I’m sure Botsman and Rogers would call that Collaborative Authoring).  In technical depth and expertise it left quite a lot to be desired.  However, in collating so many fascinating examples, I became truly excited about how technology is helping us treat the environment, and each other, with more respect. 

Let me be clear though, Collaborative Consumption is not the answer to our largest environmental challenges. It is a movement within the larger movement.

Yet, it is genuinely engaging because it’s disseminating responsibility for a large problem and creating a broader base which can aggregate all our individual decisions into something more meaningful.  Additionally, it’s happening under our noses and it feels as if it has a real momentum and a sense of inevitability about it.  But most importantly, it helps to address the age old issue with top-down environmental policy.  As John Porritt (former head of the Ecology (now Green) Party) famously summarised, “By being over prescriptive you become your own worst enemy and force people into even more defensive and negative behaviour.” 

Consequently, how do you address the public and inspire sustainable behaviour without being negative or dogmatic?  Sharing what we have sounds like a fine start.