The Sharing economy is an economy built around taking away the entirety of product life ownership, instead, giving you access to the product only when you need it. Think of Uber, Lime bike or a Zip car. Most likely, you would not have even thought of them as being part of the sharing economy, or given thought to who else uses them, as their convenience overrules any other thought.

There are multiple positives for utilising this type of economy, saving costs on upkeep, automatic access to the latest upgrade or newest addition, higher efficiency, space saving in homes, and most importantly it allows people access to products and services they might not have had access to before. You can read more on the sharing economy in tech goods here, from one of our past articles.

Design considerations include;

1:Allow for multi-use scenarios.

2:Rethink maintenance: Ease of repair to enable product longevity. Being able to update, repair and maintain products ensures they will be run on more efficient and up to date technology.

3:Repeating customisation: Designing to allow customisation for the many. This is a tricky design strategy, as a product within a sharing economy is owned by none, yet used by many. Making these products still feel personal, or adaptable to all is key. Within the fashion world garment sharing is having an uptake, which goes to show if products we put on our skin are part of the sharing economy, there should be no reason why hard goods and soft goods can not continue to grow in this market.

This requires going beyond simply designing for end-of-life. Instead of allowing materials to be recycled, closing the loop is a method of stopping the linear trajectory, putting materials and products back into use - without the need of re-manufacturing.

There needs to be a strong and robust system in place, to ensure customer adoption and integration to societal behaviour norms. Companies such as Lush offer a monetary incentive, Apple offers money off any new product purchased, for the return of any older products, likewise with IKEA’s zero-waste movement.

Implementing a closed loop strategy enables brands to have full control over the end of products life, ensuring the material, product can be re-made, reused. Often more complex materials can not be recycled, having a closed loop system then opens up the opportunity for a wider material selection, as your company can collectively send materials off to specialist recycling, material recapturing facilities, compared to the average consumer.

Further reading:

-Closing the loop

-Future of closed loop

-Inditex- closed loop

To lower the overall Carbon emissions of your company you first need to understand and work out how much carbon you are emitting. Looking at your business operations off; supply chain, manufacturing, sampling, transportation etc.

Of course not every manufacturer is completely transparent, however to gain an overview understanding a comparison of a similar manufacturer - with similar machinery and location can be used to gain this overview understanding - This is by no means a conduction of a full carbon assessment.

1: Internal change towards lower carbon emissions:

With this knowledge of your Carbon emissions aligned to your business’s processes you can start to plot where the key contributors to the creation of Carbon are. Changes may be from: a lower impactful resource, internal changes to business strategy, suppliers or on a micro level a change to the materials used.

2: Drawdown: Alongside systematic changes, an effective method of moving towards carbon neutral is through drawdown.

It should be noted that offsetting is not a ‘get out of jail card’, natural resources are still being used and carbon emissions are still being created. You may have heard about offsetting - especially being able to buy offset tokens again, this does not lead to your company being carbon neutral.

Off-setting is a useful and much needed sustainable contributor to abate carbon emissions, however it is argued that businesses should put bigger emphasis on drawdown projects.

“It has been argued that Carbon offsets don't make sense in the modern eair” (Tim Flannery) .Drawing down carbon which is already in the environment. The Ted talk video with Tim Flanney showcases the reason behind the thinking, alongside an interesting and potential ‘better’ area to invest drawdown investments into.

Further reading:

-Carbon removal

-How much CO2 does a tree absorb?

Similar to the practice of the sharing economy, rethinking ownership puts emphasis on leasing products and takes away owning them. Some models work as a monthly/annual fee, for the benefit of using the product and then return it when they no longer need it, it no longer works or there is a newer model available.

Ensures responsibility for and control of the product rests with the brand thereby ensuring the product can be refurbished, repaired or broken down for parts at the end of its use-life with a customer.

This can be seen in models such as the rental car industry, and our smart phone concept - Renew. The question of : ‘What if you never needed to buy a phone again?’ was asked. It brought discussion around disrupting the traditional ownership models of personal tech, and personal belongings. If we can think of our phones without ownership, the disruption needed to bring about more shared ownership products - with less of a personal or data driven, should be relatively easy to showcase the benefits to consumers.

Alongside environmental benefits including reverse logistics to a product which is part of the shared economy drives an incoming material return too. With the phone example, the majority of returns will either be able to be sold on, re-paired to be leased out, or material recaptured and re-used in new production. Another example to explore is Edinburgh tool station - a fully kitted out toolshed, with a monthly £5.00 payment to hire tools. This social no ownership method of renting out tools also fosters a community aspect, alongside saving used space and money on the tool - and of course all the tools will be well kept and work first time when users need them!

This has been a popular approach from boutique fashion labels seeking to minimise investment and waste by taking orders for an item in advance and only producing what has effectively already been sold.

With the developments of on-demand manufacturing technologies, robotic assembly and AI, this method of ‘only making what is needed’ could be more widely adopted by the tech and consumer product industries as they seek to minimise the cost of shipping, storage and over production.

The benefits are obvious - only make what you need and you remove the problem of excess, outdated stock that inevitably becomes waste.