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.
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