Free Sharing Is Good: How to Save Money, Time and Resources Through Collaborative Consumption by Beth Buczynski Page A

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    laborative innovation are never far behind. Along the way, waste is dramatically reduced and lifestyles typically burdened with heavy carbon footprints suddenly become more environmentally friendly,
    even though quality of life is the same. Many, myself included, feel guilty because they can’t afford an electric car or rooftop solar panels, but simply participating in the sharing economy is one of the most sustainable decisions any one of us can make.
    Reduced Waste
    Sharing drastically extends the life cycle of physical goods, thus limiting the need to buy new things until it’s truly necessary. In cases where an item or tool can’t be recycled or repurposed from existing materials, lending libraries, swaps, and rental services provide temporary access without the burden and high cost of ownership.
    Waste isn’t only the stuff we throw in trash cans. There’s also
    such a thing as wasted potential. The average car sits idle 22 hours a day. In most households that own a power drill, the tool is only used 6–13 minutes of its lifetime.11 For the majority of the time, these things sit on shelves and in driveways, costing us money, taking up space, and weighing us down. By sharing them with others, we can
    make use and even profit from these items — during their down-
    time, when we don’t need them anyway. In this way, collaborative
    consumption makes it easy to own less without feeling like you’re sacrificing things you need or enjoy.
    A 2011 study from the University of California,12 surveyed over
    6,000 members of car-sharing programs across the United States. It found that between 9 and 13 vehicles are removed from the road for 48
    Sharing is Good
    every vehicle shared through a service like Zipcar or RelayRides. Of those, four to six vehicles were eliminated as a direct result of joining car sharing; the others were cars that were simply not purchased.
    The researchers noted with interest that 80 percent of this shift in favor of car sharing was a result of single-car households becoming completely car free. This is significant because it means that rather than being a once-in-a-while solution, car sharing is completely changing the way people travel and helping to create more pedestrian-friendly communities.
    Reduced Energy Consumption
    What’s your morning commute like? For most Americans, getting
    to work in the morning means sitting in 25 minutes of traffic to go less than 50 miles. Nationwide, 86 percent of Americans over six-teen get to work by car, truck or van. And around 75 percent drive alone. That means a lot of carbon emissions getting pumped into
    the air just to move one person to and from their workplace. In the same car-sharing study conducted by the University of California
    that was mentioned above, researchers found that on average, drivers traded vehicles with a fuel economy of 23 mpg for the use of shared vehicles with a fuel economy of 33 mpg. While car-sharing organizations offer a variety of vehicles to members, the majority are highly efficient hybrids, sedans, and compact cars. This helps reduce cost to both the company and car-sharing members, as well as reducing the harmful emissions associated with personal transportation.
    In late 2011, the University of California, Berkeley, published a very interesting study: “Greenhouse Gas Emission Impacts of Carsharing in North America” (www.tsrc.berkeley.edu). Their research revealed that car-sharing programs have the power to significantly reduce overall greenhouse gas emissions in North America. The survey, which polled over 9,500 members of car-sharing programs in
    the United States and Canada, found that while individual green-
    house gas emissions increased slightly because some gained access to Why Share Now?
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    a personal vehicle for the first time, these small individual increases were outweighed by the significant number of people able to drastically reduce their emissions through car-sharing.
    “The number of carless