My limited experience with toddlers has taught me that we all go through a period in which we discover the joys of ownership and possession and are incapable of sharing. For my niece, the focus was on a certain thirst-quencher and her oft-repeated mantra (delivered with an astonishing amount of sass for someone so young) during that phase was ‘My juice!’ My colleague’s two-year-old, meanwhile, is toddling her way through the phase with the simple and effective slogan: ‘Mine!’ Fortunately for parents everywhere, this is a relatively short-lived obsession and most children quickly discover the importance of sharing.

omewhere through the years (in our possession-obsessed society), though, this message gets muddled and the focus again falls on ownership and on accumulating ‘things’. But do we really need all our possessions? Or, as grown-ups in an increasingly resource-strained world, do we need to relearn the value of sharing? As it turns out, a growing movement is doing just that.

One of the first people to identify the trend she dubbed ‘collaborative consumption’ was author and business consultant Rachel Botsman, and she has noted that the growing number of sharing platforms help fulfil our innate human need for community: “[Peer-to-peer sharing] is actually tapping into our primate instincts. We’re monkeys, and we were born and bred to share and cooperate, and we were doing so for thousands of years, whether it’s when we hunted in packs or farmed in cooperatives, before this big system called hyperconsumption came along and we built these fences and created our own little fiefdoms.”

Botsman claims evidence that we’re moving from ‘a culture of me to a culture of we’ is found in the surge of networking technologies that allow people to sell on, share, trade, lend anything from clothes to transport, accommodation, land, and even money. Things have moved on in leaps and bounds since eBay – the first internet-based ‘redistribution network’ – opened the floodgates in 1995. Many other online redistribution networks, through which goods are passed from those who don’t want them to those that do, have since joined the ranks, including sites like Gumtree and Freecycle. But that’s not all – there are now sites that allow for ‘collaborative lifestyles’, the sharing of resources like workspace (Hub Culture), living space (CouchSurfing, House Swapping), land (Landshare), parking spaces (ParkatmyHouse.com), skills, time and money (Zopa). There are also growing numbers of ‘product service systems’ that allow people to benefit from products without the need to actually own them (along the lines of traditional libraries and launderettes); examples include sharing of cars (Zipcar, WhipCar), bikes (Barclays Cycle Hire), handbags (Fashionhire), films (Love Film), and general miscellany (RentMyItems).

The key to the proliferation, Botsman says, is technology that enables trust between strangers: “We now live in a global village where we can mimic the ties that used to happen face to face, but on a scale and in ways that have never been possible before. So, what’s actually happening is that social networks and real-time technologies are taking us back. We’re bartering, trading, swapping, sharing, but they’re being reinvented into dynamic and appealing forms.”

But technology isn’t the only factor encouraging us to share more: environmental and economic concerns also come into it. Buying, buying, buying things we don’t need (the aforementioned ‘hyperconsumption’ model embraced through much of the latter half of the twentieth century and, frankly, today) is indisputably wasteful. Botsman claims that 80 per cent of items that people own are used less than once a month and points to a power drill as a particularly shocking example of ‘idling capacity’: the average power drill is used for only about 12 or 13 minutes in its entire lifetime. Half of UK homes have a power drill.

The under-used resources that sit idly in under-used power drills are just the tip of the iceberg, though: far more waste is created in the manufacturing process, from mining or synthesising of raw materials to transportation and the actual creation of products. While much more emphasis is placed on post-consumer waste management, far more waste is created (and not so rigorously managed or monitored) during most production processes. Indeed, statistics from WRAP show that for every tonne of product that reaches the market, we use 10 tonnes of fuel and materials in the production process, a figure that jumps to 100 tonnes if we include water. More shockingly, Botsman claims that the amount of waste generated in the creation of a single laptop computer is 4,000 times its weight. So, the sharing of products certainly prevents much straining of resources.

And then of course, there’s the financial element. There’s no doubt about it: as a money-saving technique, not buying things is second to none (and buying used things as an alternative is pretty handy, too). Botsman’s colleague Lauren Anderson, Innovation Director at Collaborative Consumption, explains: “[B]y the end of the first decade of the 21st century, society realised as a whole that there was no returning to pre-financial crisis levels of consumption and waste. Instead, we have seen new models of business emerging in markets around the world that are enabling us to use our assets more efficiently and gain access to the things we need without needing to acquire more stuff.”

When I point out that, in many ways, things seem to have gone back to business as usual and that most people I observe on the street still seem to embrace the buy, buy, buy mentality, she notes: “While it will certainly take some time for these new systems to become mainstream, and for collaborative consumption to be an equal force against hyperconsumption, we are already seeing amazing growth in the space... [I]t may appear that the worst of the financial crisis is over, and that people are returning to their old consumption habits, [but] it is clear that some of the ramifications of the crisis are only just beginning to be revealed... and that around the world people have really had a change in values and what they perceive to be measures of success.”

Anderson points me towards a report commissioned by Johnnie Walker (of all companies!) that polled 11,000 people worldwide and found that 52 per cent think success isn’t based on wealth and 42 per cent no longer believe material goods signify success. The report rather simplistically categorises countries into three stages in a linear progression from ‘Status Symbolists’ (Thailand, China, Vietnam) that perceive success as based on wealth, to ‘Ambitious Altruists’ (Greece, US, UK, Brazil) that start to question the wealth-as-success norm, and finally ‘Co-Operative Collaborativists’ [sic] (only Spain) where material goods do not signify success.

Whether or not you can stomach the report’s simplifications and bold generalisations, it does raise an interesting question of how emerging economies like China and India, which are just now entering a phase of hyperconsumption, will engage with collaborative consumption. Anderson says they’ve seen interest from China and India in things like bike sharing, and says Brazil could be a market leader in the field in years to come. “The challenge is to ensure that the technological infrastructure is readily available to support these systems in scaling and reaching critical mass, helping people to achieve the same level of convenience and choice they would experience through normal consumption methods.”

And as for economies that are contracting rather than emerging, well, they’re extremely well placed to benefit from a bit of sharing. Take Greece, where bartering networks are booming as its economic crisis deepens, prompting questions about the future of the euro. Here, people are using the internet to sign up to various bartering systems, including ‘local alternative unit’ schemes (TEM in Greek), offering goods and services that are valued in TEM rather than euros.

It’s not just individuals that can benefit from a bit of collaboration. The traditional business model pedalled by most corporate producers (shift as many products as possible as quickly as possible) will be challenged if collaborative consumption begins to expand, meaning they’ll have to adjust. Leading car companies like BMW, Volkswagen and Peugeot have already responded by entering the car-sharing marketplace. And there are also already opportunities for businesses, local authorities and third-sector organisations to get in on the sharing in other ways.

A redistribution network that allows businesses to donate surplus goods to charities, Giving World Online, has recently expanded operations in the UK, and ex-local authority officer Daniel O’Connor has developed WARPit, an online portal along the lines of eBay that allows users to donate, sell and rent unwanted items, both within their organisation and to partner organisations. He explains: “I recognised there was a real market need for a product to help organisations recycle internally after realising people often throw away the exact same items of furniture and equipment that their colleagues are planning to buy.

“UK plc is experiencing a period of downsizing – we have lost a significant proportion of the workforce – now where has all that furniture and equipment gone? A lot of it has been pushed into rooms, storage and warehouses – where it is sitting. Not being used... And what happens to stuff in storage? It gets forgotten about – and gets obsolete, and then has to be chucked. So some organisations are paying to store expensive waste really.”

In the first three months since it began operating, organisations including local authorities, central government, universities, schools, SMEs and third-sector groups have subscribed to the service, and O’Connor says they’ve collectively saved £63,000 through avoided procurement and waste disposal costs, made 45,000 kilogrammes (kg) of carbon savings and diverted 7,500kg of waste from landfill.

As with any sharing system, the more people that participate, the easier it will be to match needs to surpluses; a network of two won’t have many resources to pool, after all. O’Connor notes: “To stop stuff ending up in skips, you need high participation. To get high participation, you need a system which is very easy to use.” Considerations in the development of any sharing/redistribution/ product service system include minimising manual administration, allowing for ease of communication between users and ensuring users can feel confident in one another – hence the ubiquitous feedback procedures for such systems.

When dealing with companies and councils, there are also additional concerns of traceability and duty of care. Traceability can be achieved through a good database and high security measures, O’Connor says, and duty of care can be dealt with by ensuring items are described accurately and are fit for reuse – if not, they’d have to be sent for refurbishment or recycling. Yes, companies, charities, government, individuals and, of course, the environment can all now benefit from a bit of collaborative consumption. Sharing: it’s not just for kids anymore.