The electronic waste that’s discarded each year weighs more than all the commercial aircraft ever built

Paddy

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Tool libraries can simultaneously increase access to material goods and decrease total material usage. It&rsquo;s time to deploy them at scale.
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&mdash; an excerpt from <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Building-Tomorrow-Averting-Environmental-Economic/dp/1739345207/" rel="nofollow ugc noopener">Building Tomorrow: Averting Environmental Crisis With a New Economic System</a>.
In the last few decades our material consumption has increased enormously, and with it, so has our production of waste. There are many statistics demonstrating that we are throwing away far too much stuff. Here is&nbsp;<a href="https://www.itu.int/en/mediacentre/Documents/A_New_Circular_Vision_for_Electronics.pdf" rel="nofollow ugc noopener">one of them</a>: the electronic waste that&rsquo;s discarded each year weighs more than all the commercial aircraft ever built.
That&rsquo;s a lot of waste being produced every single year. And it is currently only providing part of the world&rsquo;s population with a good material quality of life. If everyone else attains a similar level of consumption in the same way and we keep it going for another generation or two, the world will begin to resemble a gigantic rubbish dump. Something is going to have to change.
An essential element of solving this problem is simply using less stuff. We are already using immense amounts of resources, but there are still billions of people in poverty. For everyone in the world to have access to enough material goods, we will need to share that access much more effectively.
Looking at this issue as being about people having enough access to goods rather than owning those goods themselves is a powerful way of framing the issue that opens up a whole new set of solutions.&nbsp;<a href="https://torontotoollibrary.com/" rel="nofollow ugc noopener">The Toronto Tool Library</a>&nbsp;is one of the pioneers of one such solution: libraries of things.
Libraries of things are exactly what they sound like; they are just like book libraries, except that instead of stocking books, they stock things. Tool libraries are a specific subset of libraries of things that specialise in tools. Toronto Tool Library is one of these. For a small annual fee, members can have access to many thousands of tools when they need them.
While libraries of things have great potential, they are more suitable for some classes of items and less so for others. For example, for items that are used very regularly, it would be impractical to try to borrow them only when needed. And items that are used seasonally, such as camping equipment, can be hard to accommodate into a library of things model because the library needs to store them out of season, which can cause problems if space is limited.
Tools are a class of items that are particularly suited to the library approach. It is almost a clich&eacute;, in the sharing economy world at least, to say that the average drill is used for about 13 minutes in its lifetime. I don&rsquo;t know where that specific statistic originated, but the idea is sound. Each person or family only uses a drill occasionally, but because everyone does need one sometimes, conventionally, each household needs to own one. It would be much cheaper and more environmentally friendly for many households to share one drill, each being able to access it when they need it. This is what a tool library allows us to do.
The Toronto Tool Library has taken this much further than drills. It was started in 2012 by a group of friends who wanted to create local change in communities after one of the founders, Ryan Dyment, heard about an early tool library that had opened in the 1970s in America. They did it on a shoestring &ndash; having started a non-profit and won a small grant, they borrowed a basement to use as the library and relied on donations of tools to get their inventory going.
&lsquo;Relied on donations&rsquo; makes it sound like it was difficult to get going, but in fact, they found that once people heard about them, they were positively eager to give them tools. So many people had old tools hanging around in their garage they didn&rsquo;t really need that &lsquo;the phone was ringing off the hook&rsquo; according to Dyment. They were well-organised and professional, and quickly got good publicity that enabled them to grow, and they now have thousands of tools available.
But it is not easy to organise and run a successful library of things. One challenge all libraries of things need to overcome is funding. They are very capital-intensive because they need a brick-and-mortar shop and people to staff it.
One solution to this problem is not to have libraries at all but instead use a peer-to-peer lending model. In this model, people use a platform website to offer their own goods for others to borrow (for a small fee). This model works very well for expensive and specialist items, like high-end cameras, drones, and laboratory equipment, and such platforms exist. For example, <a href="https://fatllama.com/" rel="nofollow ugc noopener">Fat Llama</a>&nbsp;offers this service for individual-to-individual lending, and&nbsp;<a href="https://rheaply.com/" rel="nofollow ugc noopener">Rheaply</a>&nbsp;does so for lending within and between organisations. But this system doesn&rsquo;t work for tools and other less valuable items. For peer-to-peer lending to work, people need to have an incentive to lend, as well as borrow, items. Expensive pieces of kit can be hired out at a rate that makes it worth people&rsquo;s while to offer them, but this is not the case for cheaper items.
In the case of tools, there is another problem. When you need to do a DIY job, you usually need to borrow various items at once. With peer-to-peer lending, this could mean you need to borrow from multiple people, but as you need to personally collect each item from its lender, this can quickly become more hassle than it&rsquo;s worth. Tool libraries don&rsquo;t have this problem because all the tools are in one place, and with a little thought, they can save their members even more hassle. Toronto Tool Library offers tool packs to cover specific jobs so members don&rsquo;t need to work out exactly what they need themselves.
This leaves the funding problem unresolved. It is normal for tool libraries to charge a membership fee, plus a day rate for some items &ndash; Toronto Tool Library does this for battery-powered, bench-top, and high-maintenance tools. But it&rsquo;s difficult to balance an affordable price with covering the costs of the equipment to lend, the people to staff the library and, most importantly of all, the cost of renting and running the physical premises.
This brick-and-mortar cost is currently the main obstacle to scaling the idea and opening tool libraries around the world, but there is a potential solution, and the clue is in the name: tool &lsquo;library&rsquo;. Libraries are, in many countries at least, a public service. It&rsquo;s easy to make a case that tool libraries should also be provided as a public service, free of charge so that everyone has the ability to make and repair things. It&rsquo;s possible that a government would agree with this and fund the provision of tool libraries. However, that does seem quite unlikely at the moment.
Another solution is philanthropic funding, and this too has a precedent. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the businessman and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie part-funded the creation of 3,000 libraries. He paid to build and equip them, so long as the local authority provided the land and covered the running costs.
A similar arrangement could be organised to create a network of tool libraries, with philanthropic funding paying for the buildings and the initial tools and either government funding or membership fees paying for the ongoing costs. This is a much more realistic goal:&nbsp;<a href="https://givingpledge.org/pledgerlist" rel="nofollow ugc noopener">200 of the world&rsquo;s richest people</a>&nbsp;have pledged to donate half of their wealth to philanthropy, and some of them are a long way from having done so. A clear, well-structured plan to set up a global network of tool libraries, in which philanthropists cover the initial capital costs and suitable local people run the libraries as non-profit entities, might be a good way for some of them to get closer to fulfilling their pledge.
There are also ways for individual tool libraries to get funding or space themselves. For example,&nbsp;<a href="https://sjtl.ca/" rel="nofollow ugc noopener">Saint John Tool Library</a>&nbsp;in New Brunswick couldn&rsquo;t get any social enterprise funding to begin with, so they started a construction business operating out of their tool library. Once they had built up their library membership, they turned the construction business into a training program to help people struggling with unemployment get into the trades.
The problem of finding a space for a tool library can be solved by looking for unused spaces, such as the spare basement in which Toronto Tool Library began, or by businesses supporting their local community through providing space for a tool library.
Between finding creative ways to bootstrap a tool library and persuading philanthropists to fund capital costs, there will be many opportunities to solve the funding issue and found more tool libraries. It is important we do: tool libraries have the potential to simultaneously decrease material usage and increase access to material goods, both of which are needed if we are to create a more equitable and ecological society.
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This article is also published on the <a href="https://paddyleflufy.substack.com/p/its-time-for-tool-libraries-to-go" target="_blank" rel="noopener">author's blog</a>. illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Sustainability &amp; Energy writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.
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It's time for tool libraries to go global

There is a serious waste problem in the world today: microplastics have been found everywhere, from the top of Everest to the bottom of the ocean.

It&rsquo;s well-known fact that there is a serious waste problem in the world today. Microplastics have been found everywhere, from <a href="https://www.cell.com/one-earth/fulltext/S2590-3322(20)30550-9">the top of Everest</a> to <a href="https://www.snexplores.org/article/deep-sea-dump-trash-collecting-arctic-seafloor">the bottom of the ocean</a>. The electronic waste that&rsquo;s discarded each year <a href="https://www.itu.int/en/mediacentre/Documents/A_New_Circular_Vision_for_Electronics.pdf">weighs more</a> than all the commercial aircraft ever built. And it is commonplace for companies to build products that break &ndash; and so become waste &ndash; sooner than they should. They do this so that their customers buy the products more regularly, which makes the companies more money.
The overall approach that can solve the waste problem is moving to a <a href="https://ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/topics/circular-economy-introduction/overview">circular economy</a>, in which products are always reused or recycled. In a circular economy, there is no such thing as trash, because materials cycle endlessly around the economy and never need to be thrown away.&nbsp;
An important strategy for creating a circular economy is to change business models so that companies make more money when they create less waste. This can be done by using the sale-of-service business model.
In this model, customers don&rsquo;t buy the products. They buy the service the products provide, with ownership of the physical products themselves remaining with the business. If a product breaks, it is the business that has to pay for the repair or replacement. This means the business makes more money the longer its products last, aligning the business&rsquo;s incentives with the need to decrease environmental impact. This model is recognised as an important strategy and is being applied to a vast range of products, from <a href="http://bundles.nl/">washing machines</a> to <a href="https://www.riversimple.com/how-the-business-works/">cars</a>. There&rsquo;s even a company that provides light as a service though a <a href="https://www.engineeringsolutions.philips.com/insights/philips-transition-linear-circular-economy/">&lsquo;pay-per-lux&rsquo; model</a>!
But one company is taking the sale-of-service model further than this, and in doing so, they are creating a system that might turn out to be truly revolutionary.&nbsp;
The company is <a href="https://www.riversimple.com/">Riversimple</a>, a hydrogen fuel cell car company based in Wales whose cars will hopefully be commercially available by 2025. Riversimple has a purpose written into its legal documents, which is to &lsquo;build and operate vehicles while systematically pursuing elimination of the environmental impact caused by personal transport&rsquo;. As part of its quest to fulfil this mission, it is pioneering a new approach to solving the waste problem: it is extending the sale-of-service model through its supply chain.
Rather than selling cars, Riversimple will provide vehicles as a service. Customers will pay a monthly fee plus an amount per mile, which will cover all of the costs of running a car: the car itself, the fuel, the insurance, and the maintenance. This aligns Riversimple&rsquo;s financial incentives with the interests of the customers and the environment, because as they make the car more fuel-efficient, longer-lasting, and more reliable, they will decrease their own costs and therefore increase their profits.&nbsp;
This is in sharp contrast to the traditional business model of car makers, who make more money by selling more cars. In the old model, car makers have no direct financial incentive to improve fuel efficiency, and sometimes they have a perverse incentive to make unreliable cars so they can make more money by charging for repairs.
This is the usual sale-of-service model applied to a car company. But Riversimple are taking the sale-of-service model and the alignment of incentives it creates further by extending this model up the supply chain. One of the most critical and expensive parts of a hydrogen car is the fuel cell itself (the fuel cell is the hydrogen car equivalent of the engine). Having a more reliable and longer-lasting fuel cell is in the financial interests of Riversimple, as well as being better for the environment. If they buy the fuel cell from the manufacturer, reliability is only in the interests of the manufacturer to the extent that it affects whether Riversimple continue buying their fuel cells. So instead of buying fuel cells, Riversimple is going to pay the manufacturer for the electricity the fuel cells provide, on a sale-of-service model. They will pay a monthly amount, plus an amount per hour of run-time and a bonus for fuel cell efficiency. This means the manufacturer is incentivised to create more reliable and efficient fuel cells, aligning their incentives with the interests of Riversimple&rsquo;s investors, their customers, and the environment.
This is not the limit of how far the sale-of-service model can go, nor how far Riversimple are taking it. Within the fuel cell, the most critical and expensive part is the membrane. Riversimple are working with the fuel cell manufacturer so that instead of buying the membranes, they pay for their use, again on a sale-of-service model. They use the same cost structure of a monthly amount plus an amount per hour of run-time and a bonus for efficiency, aligning the incentives of the membrane manufacturer as well.
The most expensive part of the membrane itself is made of platinum, which acts as a catalyst, so is not consumed by the fuel cell and can be fully recycled. Precious metals like platinum are not only expensive, mining them is also very environmentally damaging. So Riversimple is also working with the membrane manufacturer so they lease the platinum within the membranes from the mining company, paying an amount per month per gram of platinum used.&nbsp;
This means the mining company will retain ownership of the platinum, so once the fuel cell needs to be recycled, the platinum will either be recycled with it and the lease continue, or be returned to the mining company. They will then be able to lease it back to Riversimple in a new membrane or lease or sell it to someone else. This leasing model effectively incentivises the mining company to recycle the platinum so that they can continue to profit as it is reused over and over again.
Moving the sale-of-service model all the way up the supply chain like this is not easy. On a technical level, they will need to accurately keep track of the usage rates of each individual fuel cell and membrane in order to calculate payments. This will necessitate both sensors in the cars and a tagging system to keep track of the parts, of which blockchain is an essential component. On a business level, they will need to persuade companies all the way up the supply chain to try out an innovative business model despite the technical challenges.&nbsp;
To overcome these challenges and help drive the transition to a circular economy, Riversimple, in partnership with Swansea University and the University of Exeter, has launched <a href="https://circularrevolution.wales/">Circular Revolution</a>, a circular economy innovation centre. Circular Revolution has six pilot projects to develop the systems needed to make it possible to implement sale-of-service throughout the supply chain. It also has an outreach programme to help businesses in West Wales engage with the circular economy.&nbsp;
Successfully moving to this model would have many positive consequences. One of the immediate consequences is a realignment of design incentives at each level. As soon as Hugo Spowers, the founder of Riversimple, suggested this model to the membrane manufacturer, they said they would make more efficient membranes by using more platinum. This would be better environmentally, as the fuel cells would be more efficient. It didn&rsquo;t make economic sense when they were selling membranes, because platinum is so expensive; but under the new model of leasing the membranes out with the potential to earn an efficiency bonus, increasing the amount of platinum would also increase their revenue. The new model brought their financial incentives into alignment with the aim of decreasing their environmental impact.
If this model becomes more widespread, it could have deeper consequences that will massively increase uptake of circular economy principles. For instance, while miners of elements such as precious metals and rare earths simply mine, refine, and sell those elements, their incentives are opposed to the circular economy because they need a continual demand for virgin material to be able to keep mining. But if they lease rather than sell the elements they mine and the materials they make from them, they can transition from being miners of valuable substances to being stewards of those substances, ensuring they are always able to be used and are recoverable after use. They might even stop mining altogether.&nbsp;
Right now we are a long way from mining companies choosing to stop mining, just as we are a long way from solving the waste problem. But it is essential that we do if we are to create a truly sustainable society, and innovators such as Riversimple are demonstrating how this might be possible.&nbsp;
This article is adapted from excerpts of Building Tomorrow: Averting Environmental Crisis With a New Economic System.&nbsp;illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Sustainability &amp; Energy writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.

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Paddy Le Flufy

Paddy Le Flufy

It's time for tool libraries to go global

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