I have been developing a set of creativity tools for my sustainability consultancy, Green LLC, for the past 6 months and to my surprise I now have over 150 ways to help companies to innovate and become more sustainable!
During my research this week I came across a series of pieces that spoke about consumption and suddenly they are starting to make connections in my brain. I share this idea in the hope that someone is triggered to see how we can solve it in an elegant way.
First, I saw a great picture of a Japanese family (average Tokyo house size around 800-1200sq ft remember) who had taken all their worldly belongings out of their house and spread them out on their front lawn. It was quite an amazing visual!
Wow, so much stuff! Now consider that the average American house is 2500sq ft!
One of the techniques I researched was the idea of usage. Stop and think for a minute of all the DIY tools out there. The countless drills, saws, screwdriver sets, axes, shovels and hammers. How many hours usage a year do you suppose these tools get versus how much a tradesman or builder might use them? In general the things we own see very little actual usage.
Now cast your mind over to the developing world, were there are literally billions of people without access to simple tools! Of course this applies just as much to kitchen tools, sports tools, recreational tools and so on.
Our relative wealth has afforded us above all else the notion of convenience. That is why we own our own hammer, or 2 or 3! So in order to make an improvement in sustainability we need to arrive at a better system of creating convenience.
Is it so stupid to imagine a system where 4/8/16 neighbors share certain resources? We already agree to share swimming pools and tennis courts for this reason.
Maybe we need a new type of house/neighborhood design to achieve this with a central common area, or a new way to think of common spaces in apartment living where each floor shares a workshop, sports room, special kitchen tools cupboard, games room or sewing room. Imagine that when each of these collectives were being set up that the owners would actually sponsor a duplicate set of tools for a village somewhere in the developing world.
A collective of 4 families would only be paying ΒΌ each instead of having to buy 4 separate sets of tools. They may be happy with a saving of 50% and doing good as well. It gets way better when more share!
This thought ties in to my previous blog in that it takes the individual purchase and product up a notch to become part of a system, an infrastructure item that has a life that exceeds that of an individually owned product. It also utilizes the resource better, in this case by a factor of 4-16x!
This is a VERY substantial improvement because when I do Life Cycle Assessments for companies, we are looking for ways to reduce the environmental impact of a product. Often we can only make 10-40% improvements, but with this simple change of ownership idea we reduce the impact by much more. When we extend the usage of the product we divide the impact up over many more hours of use!
This saving far exceeds anything that we could achieve on the manufacturing side and besides, we end up doing real good for the developing world.
I have been working on a Social Sustainability project to support the Millennium villages, a project of the Millennium Development Goal initiative of the UN to reduce poverty by 2015. The idea I am working on is to develop micro-economy pods, called Green Pods. These pods make use of a container to be dropped into a developing village that would kick start economic activity in that village. The above idea would work really well as a means of financing a small basic workshop to be dropped into a village. This would provide the means for them to start to make things and therefore to start craft based product production. This affords them the means to create basic essential products for themselves as well as for sale.
Can we rethink ownership of objects in a practical, convenient way for Western Society?
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