How often do we end up buying something we only need to use once or twice?
Wouldn’t it be great if you could just borrow it from a neighbour? Problem is most of us don’t know our neighbours well enough to ask if we even know them at all . But that’s where Friends with Things steps in – it’s a place where you can borrow and share things with your neighbours for free and you can share more than just ‘things’, you can also share your time, expertise or knowledge.
This sharing often leads to a connection with your neighbours and chance at making new friends. Iit can really help bring back that sense of neighbourhood that’s so often missing from apartment complexes, city living and suburban sprawl. It’s a small way we can help each other and start to make our communities the friendlier, safer happier places we’d all like to live in.
Sharing like this is called ‘collaborative consumption’ – and it has another really important benefit: the more we share the less we consume, so there’s a huge environmental benefit. If you think that about it, our houses are full of things we only ever use now and again – from power drills, to camping gear; consider the huge environmental cost of manufacturing them, the fossil fuel and energy used in moving them around the world – not to mention the cost of buying them.
Rachel Botsman and Roo Rodgers authors of “What’s mine is YOURs” give us this startling statistic about the household drill – the average power drill is used between 7 and 13 minutes over its entire lifetime and there are around 50 million drills currently sitting idle in people’s homes today.