We waste: someone wastes food, not being able to finish what was cooked. Someone wastes time. Wastes ideas, not knowing how to realize them. Wastes life, not knowing what to do with it or having too many responsibilities to handle. We waste a lot of things: cars and gadgets, clothes and household items that we no longer need, but can’t or don’t want to sell.
But right at the same moment there’s someone around who couldn’t cook that day. There are people who don’t have any ideas, but have a lot of energy to create. There’s someone who doesn’t have a new dress to go out for a party and has to consume something quickly from fast fashion.
Fast (and even luxury) fashion, consumerism, constant need of new things - all create waste. Environmental and emotional. This waste can be avoided thanks to the sharing economy.
Often the sharing economy is perceived as a way to save money. In fact, it also saves the environment.
A simple example: The moment one person throws away a dinner that his family can’t finish, thoughts about a constant hunger in the world are too overwhelming to make a change, but it may turn out that their neighbour (maybe a young artist or a single parent) can’t have his/her own dinner today.
Any food that is thrown away rots in the landfills and emits methane (one of the most harmful greenhouse gases).
The sharing economy helps us to become zero waste. There are numerous food sharing applications and groups (the list will come soon). Anyone who has leftover food can upload a picture to the app, so others can request and collect the food.
Even a very conscious consumer who never throws away food, still has food scraps after cooking. Peels, stems, cores sent to the landfill also create methane. I'm not ready to compost at home... but there’s an application called sharewaste (sharewaste.com), where we can share food scraps with farmers, who then compost it, creating natural fertilizer for the soil.
But how to choose to whom I give if five or ten neighbours contacted me? - some people may ask.
That’s the most amazing moment of the sharing economy. Among these people - there is someone that I would be really happy to meet: a like-minded person, a person with whom I share interests, a person who likes the same book or TV show, and we can discuss... or a person who has the same dreams, or even could achieve the dreams that I have! So much to talk about! So much to share!
Here’s the difference: isolated we leave behind waste and dangerous gases. Connecting - we can fertilize soil, have interesting conversations, meet people that we like, and start living days that are interesting and different from each other.
Another example:
A dress or jeans that we don’t use also can create environmental damage. How? It takes around 2700 liters of water to make one T-Shirt and around 7,000-15,000 liters for one pair of jeans. When we want to wear something new we usually just buy it. But instead of buying new things, increasing the waste of resources we can use a website or an application to share our clothes: to borrow, give away, lend, take from a person that we like.
Sharing is not suffering as many people perceive it. And a zero waste lifestyle is not ascetic. We don’t have to give away what we need to people we don’t like. Sharing is a dance.
A - the sharing economy, brings us to B - a zero waste lifestyle, creating a Dance of lives between like minded people, leading to the world of ABunDANCE.
(more about this in my book AboveMesopotamia that will appear on this page soon: https://abndance.blogspot.com/p/read-above-mesopotamia.html)