Happy Thursday!
It’s your friendly neighborhood solutions journalist coming to you with a story focusing on a climate solution founded in a simple, grade-school lesson: Sharing is Caring.
It almost sounds silly, but the truth is, constructing systems that facilitate sharing across communities has a huge part to play in how we address overconsumption and its consequences. When items are shared and reused, their impacts on the environment are reduced simply because fewer of them need to be produced to satisfy the same need.
So this week in Alternative Futures, we’ll be looking at the movement surrounding “Libraries of Things,” both for their environmental benefits and for the other benefits they provide to communities.
Enjoy!
—Syris Valentine
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Libraries of things provide crucial community infrastructure for a solidarity economy and climate resilience
Syris Valentine | Deceleration
When Josh Epstein and his wife first decided to convert the garage of their new home into a small apartment and made their budgets, the costs were staggering. Renting scaffolding so they could install drywall on the ceiling would cost $1,000 on its own. And they’d still need to get the equipment to do everything else the conversion demanded. So when they discovered the Northeast Seattle Tool Library, it was something of a financial godsend. After spending under $100 on a yearlong membership, they could borrow the scaffolding they needed along with saws, jackhammers, and other assorted tools.
“I was enamored,” Epstein told Deceleration.
He tried to volunteer with the tool library after that and its host organization, Sustainable Northeast Seattle, but they never got back to him. Soon after, he saw they posted a job. Everything about the position resonated with him and his values. He applied almost immediately. With the assorted set of skills he’d gained running outdoor education programs with the YMCA and getting sent around the country to train others to run similar programs of their own, he felt that he was perfect for the job, and the hiring committee seemed to agree.
“It was a minimum wage, part-time job, but I wasn’t looking to climb any ladders,” said Epstein. “I was just excited. I loved the tool library.” But before long, he and the other part-time employee realized “there was infinite potential,” he said.
All the members and volunteers were so enthusiastic about it, it became easy to grow. Whenever Epstein would talk to people about it who weren’t already involved, they understood it right away. Some would even start selling the idea back to him.
“It's so intuitive,” he said, “because all it is is sharing resources, which is what humans have done from the very existence of society.”
As he brought in more volunteers, got people motivated, and provided them with a sense of agency, everything took off. The organization eventually opened a second tool library in a suburb just north of Seattle and, at the same time, rebranded themselves “Seattle Reconomy.” They chose the name in part because the whole notion of sustainability has gotten greenwashed in recent years, Epstein said, and because they’re leaning increasingly into the work of building a circular economy and “fostering an economy of reuse and sharing.”
Today, they’ve recruited around 10,000 members and 12 staff, and Epstein serves as their executive director. And they promote the practices of reuse and sharing through their tool libraries — which also house seed libraries and a reuse store selling used bikes, second-hand building materials, and old power tools — and through a new location they opened in mid-July called the Reuse Commons.
They describe the Commons as a “circular economy mall,” where partner organizations dedicated to the many varied tasks of building a circular economy can operate, host events, store equipment and materials, and convene together. Still, tool libraries remain the organization’s bread and butter.
In that effort, Seattle Reconomy is part of an international movement that has been growing for decades to counter the increasing consumerist tilt of today’s economy.
The Evolution of the Sharing Economy
“People have been sharing things forever,” said Tom Llewellyn, programs director at the nonprofit Shareable. Shareable emerged in 2009 during the recession to support the growth and awareness of the sharing movement that was gaining steam at the time. At the time the sharing economy was taking off in popularity, and they were intent on documenting it and providing on ramps for others.
Llewellyn joined that movement through one of Shareable’s events. After traveling around the country co-leading the Sustainable Living Roadshow, Llewellyn settled in Asheville, North Carolina, at the tail end of 2012, where he quickly got involved in community organizing. In 2013, he and his friends brought together 25 people from around Asheville to participate in a local rendition of Shareable’s international map jam along with 50 other towns and cities around the world.
Together, they plotted as many of Asheville’s community resources they could find and think of: parks, farmers markets, libraries, credit unions, community clinics, co-ops, repair shops, and more.
“What those maps do,” Llewellyn told Deceleration, “is not only show everything that’s there, but they also show what’s missing from those spaces.”
