What's Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption. Rachel Botsman, Roo Rogers

In the 20th century humanity consumed products faster than ever, but this way of living is no longer sustainable. This new and important book shows how technological advances are driving forms of 'collaborative consumption' which will change forever the ways in which we interact both with businesses and with each other. The average lawn mower is used for four hours a year. The average power drill is used for only twenty minutes in its entire lifespan. The average car is unused for 22 hours a day, and even when it is being used there are normally three empty seats. Surely there must be a way to get the benefit out of things like mowers, drills and even cars, without having to carry the huge up-front costs of ownership? There is indeed. Collaborative consumption is not just a buzzword, it is a new win-win way of life. This insightful and thought-provoking new book by Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers is an important and fast-moving survey of the dramatic changes we are seeing in the way we consume products. Many of us are familiar with freecycle, eBay, couchsurfing and Zipcar. But these are just the beginning of a new phenomenon. Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers have interviewed business leaders and opinion formers around the world to draw together the many strands of Collaborative Consumption into a coherent and challenging argument to show that the way we did business and consumerism in the 20th century is not the way we will do it in the 21st century.

WHAT’S MINE IS YOURS is about Collaborative Consumption, a new, emerging economy made possible by online social networks and fueled by increasing cost consciousness and environmental necessity. Collaborative Consumption occurs when people participate in organized sharing, bartering, trading, renting, swapping, and collectives to get the same pleasures of ownership with reduced personal cost and burden, and lower environmental impact.

The book addresses three growing models of Collaborative Consumption: Product Service Systems, Communal Economies, and Redistribution Markets. The first, Product Service Systems, reflects the increasing number of people from all different backgrounds and across ages who are buying into the idea of using the service of the product-what it does for them-without owning it. Examples include Zipcar and Ziploc, and these companies are disrupting traditional industries based on models of individual ownership. Second, in what the authors define as Communal Economies, there is a growing realization that as individual consumers, we have relatively little in the way of bargaining power with corporations. A crowd of consumers, however, introduces a different, empowering dynamic. Online networks are bringing people together again and making them more willing to leverage the proverbial power of numbers. Examples of this second category include Etsy, an online market for handcrafts, or the social lending marketplace Zopa. The third model is Redistribution Markets, exemplified by worldwide networks such as Freecycle and Ebay as well as emerging forms of modern day bartering and “swap trading” such as Zwaggle, Swaptree, and Zunafish. Social networks facilitate consumer-to-consumer marketplaces that redistribute goods from where they are not needed to somewhere or someone where they are. This business model encourages reusing/reselling of old items rather them throwing them out, thereby reducing the waste and carbon emissions that go along with new production.

WHAT’S MINE IS YOURS describes how these three models come together to form a new economy of more sustainable consumerism. Collaborative Consumption started as a trend in conjunction with the emergence of shared collective content/information sites such as Wikipedia and Flickr and with the recent economic troubles and increasing environmental awareness, it is growing into an international movement. The authors predict it will be a fully fledged economy within the next five years.

In this book the authors travel among the quiet revolutionaries (consumers and companies) from all around the world. They explore how businesses will both prosper and fail in this environment, and, in particular, they examine how it has the potential to help create the mass sustainable change in consumer behaviors this planet so desperately needs. The authors themselves are environmentalists, but they are also entrepreneurs, parents, and optimistic citizens. This is a good news book about long-term positive change.