Collaborative Consuption

In November 2008, a 34-year-old security guard called Jdimytai Damour was trampled to death at a Wal-Mart store in Valley Stream, New York, by what local papers described as an "out-of-control" mob of 2,000 "frenzied" shoppers who had queued overnight in the promise of a slash-price sale. With the crowd outside chanting, "Push the doors in", staff climbed on to vending machines to escape the resulting stampede. Even when police later declared that the shop was closed because it was now a crime scene, angry shoppers remonstrated with officers. One yelled: "I've been queuing since yesterday morning." The bargains on offer included a 50-in plasma HDTV priced at $798.

Rachel Botsman, a "social innovator" who has presented her ideas at Downing Street and before Microsoft and Google executives, retells the event in her book, What's Mine Is Yours: How Collaborative Consumption is Changing the Way We Live. "It's a sad and chilling metaphor for our culture at large – a crowd of exhausted consumers knocking down the doors and ploughing down people simply to buy more stuff."

Botsman rails in the book against the excesses, futility and contradictions of mass consumption, but she doesn't rehash the usual tropes of anti-consumerism. Rather, her book is a cry for us to consume "smarter" by moving away from the outdated concept of outright ownership – and the lust to own – towards one where we share, barter, rent and swap assets that include not just consumables, but also our "time and space".

The notion of "collaborative consumption" is not, she notes, new – it has been around for centuries. But the arrival of internet-enabled social networking, coupled with "geo-located" smart phones, has super-charged a concept that was already rapidly gaining primacy owing to the twin pressures of our environmental and economic crises. Echoing the Japanese concept of muda – the relentless hunt for, and eradication of, inefficiencies in any system – collaborative consumption aims to exploit previously ignored or unnoticed value in all our assets by both eliminating waste and generating demand for goods and services that are otherwise "idling".

Botsman uses the example of motoring to show where collaborative consumption already makes sense. "Cars are 90% under-utilised by their owners," she tells me from her home in Australia. "And 70% of journeys are solo rides. So we now see car club companies such as Streetcar proving very popular in cities. In Munich, BMW now has a scheme where it lets members pay for a car by the minute rather than by the hour. And websites such as ParkatmyHouse.com are allowing people to make money from unused space outside their properties. A great example is a church in Islington, London, which was facing financial trouble. But it started renting parking space out front and it now makes £70,000 a year from doing so."

If the internet and social networking act as lubricants for collaborative consumption, then trust is the glue that binds it together. None of this would work if we didn't have faith that the invariably anonymous person at the other end of the transaction will do what they promise; namely, pay for your goods or services, or deliver what they have advertised.

"Really interesting things are happening with trust at the moment," says Botsman. "We don't trust centralised monopolies, but we do trust decentralised systems. So we see peer-to-peer money-lending sites such as Zopa proving popular, in stark comparison to banks. 'Trust circles' are being built online for things such as skill-sharing, space rental and task-running. eBay has shown us that trust-based transactions work online. The US is about 18 months ahead of the UK at the moment with all this, but sites such as TaskRabbit and Hey, Neighbor! are redefining what a neighbour is."

One of Botsman's most radical ideas is that the rise of collaborative consumption in coming years will see the advent of "reputation banks". In her book, she writes: "Now with the web we leave a reputation trail. With every seller we rate; spammer we flag; comment we leave; idea, comment, video or photo we post; peer we review, we leave a cumulative record of how well we collaborate and if we can be trusted."

Soon, Botsman argues, our reputation rating will be as, if not more, important than our credit rating. "It is only a matter of time before there is some form of network that aggregates your reputation capital across multiple forms of collaborative consumption. We'll be able to perform a Google-like search to see a complete picture of how people behave and the degree to which they can be trusted, whether it's around products they swap and trade or money they lend or borrow or land or cars they share."

Botsman's advice for anyone considering diving into the world of collaborative consumption is to begin by drawing up an inventory of your assets. Gumtree.com estimates that the average UK home has nearly £600 worth of unused items – old gadgets, books, clothes etc – collecting dust. But Botsman says to think more laterally: consider the spare storage space you might have under the stairs or in a garage; the electric drill you could rent to neighbours; your unique skills – dog-walking, accountancy, shelf-fitting – you could hire by the hour, or exchange for someone else's skill.

Like many people, I've dabbled with some of these concepts before. I've flogged unwanted items on eBay. I've signed up to lift-sharing websites and joined a car club. I've looked into how TimeBank works. I enjoy eking out extra value from my "idling assets", but I also hate waste so relish any opportunity to see a resource fully utilised.

But critical mass seems to be just as an important an ingredient to collaborative consumption as trust and the connectivity of the internet. If there aren't enough people "out there" offering or demanding these goods and services, then these systems quickly wither. "Yes, you've got to have critical mass for this to work," says Botsman. "Not just geographical, but across subject categories."

So, to stress-test the hypothesis of collaborative consumption myself, I trialled three popular examples.

Clothes 'swishing'

Early last year, Anna Dalziel, an HR executive from Truro in Cornwall, decided to channel her "addiction" for car-boot sales and eBay into a public-spirited hobby. She approached the owners of a cafe in a converted grammar school in Redruth and asked if she could host a clothes-swapping "swish" in one of the school's disused corridors. She now holds weekly events across west Cornwall and has attracted nearly 600 attendees.

"Sometimes it can get a bit scary," says Dalziel ominously, as I arrive clutching a bag containing a skirt my wife has sent me to swap "for something nice". (No pressure, then.) "It's often a case of having to sharpen your elbows if you really want something."

Swishing rules vary according to the organiser, but Dalziel operates a system whereby women (I am very much the lone male) earn a single swap credit for every item they bring with them. Some other swishes sort clothes into higher and lower value piles, with, for example, a designer label item being worth 10 credits compared to a single-credit Topshop top. To pay for the time it takes to do all this sorting, organisers charge up to £20 at the door. However, Dalziel just charges £3 to cover her costs – fuel and venue hire – and operates a strict all-items-are-equal rule.

Clothing racks marked with sizes have been lined up along a corridor. Around 15 people are waiting in the adjacent cafe for "kick-off". Dalziel says it's normally double that, but the rain might have kept people at home.

As the women stream in, I stand back. "Many women treat swishing like a clothes library," says Dalziel, as she takes the entrance fee. "You sometimes see the same items rotating week to week. Some people come before they go on holiday just to stock up and I know some women who have swapped around 500 items over the past year. I think people find they have less commitment to an item than if they had bought it so have an attitude that they can just bring it back next week."

I finally go to the clothes racks and tentatively let my fingers walk along the hangers. I don't know what I'm looking for and Dalziel kindly realises this so comes over and holds up some brand new bikinis. I just take one to avoid any further awkwardness. The inevitable questions from my wife about why I've come home with a bikini await.

"Facebook has been brilliant for us," says Dalziel. "I just announce to everyone who has signed up when the next event is and it goes from there. The most we've ever had is about 90 people at an event we held at Penryn which attracts lots of students. That got a bit scary, but I would say 30-40 people is the ideal number. After each swish I sort through the remaining clothes and sort a pile for the charity shop or recycling. The rest I store at home and take to the next event. Some people treat us a bit like a charity shop and then want lots of credits. But that's not how it works, so we have a ban on things like underwear. I don't do this to sort through women's old bras."

I'm curious to know whether she thinks a male-orientated swish would work. "I don't think so really. We did try a kids swish once thinking parents would like to swap toys, baby accessories and clothes. But it just didn't take off for some reason. It was also much harder to organise and manage the stock. And I'm just not sure whether, say, a tool swap for men would work as well. I sometimes wonder whether my swishes are more about the chance to socialise than they are about the clothes. Perhaps that's the secret?"

Local swapping

In my hunt for a swapping service that isn't limited to clothes, I turn to the internet. The first I try is U-Exchange, which seems to mimic the popular TV show of my childhood, Swap Shop.

I type in my location, but the results are far from encouraging. The nearest person to me is offering a football table in exchange for "SAS war books". I'm unsure what I find less appealing: the items to be traded, or the thought of meeting up with this person.

Ecomodo is a far bigger site, probably because it doesn't limit itself to swapping, but also allows users to give or, for a fee set by the owner, rent items to anyone who might want them.

Again, I type in my location. And, again, I'm disappointed. All that is returned is someone 15 miles away renting their cross-trainer for £4.34 a day.

It is patently obvious that these sites work best when you live within or close to a high-density population, not in a rural setting such as my home county of Cornwall. This is borne out when I type in my old London postcode to find more than 200 items offered, ranging from a tennis racket (free) and chocolate fountain (free), through to wellies (£2.27 a day) and a lawnmower (£4.34 a day). I can easily see how this could be a fantastic – and somewhat addictive – resource.

Postal swapping

Botsman recommends Bookhopper, which lets users swap books much in the same way as a swish for clothes but facilitated through the post. Swaps are limited by national boundaries (to keep postal costs down) and you must offer at least 10 books before you can request one. This way there is always a fluid stock of books in the system.

My wife warns me that all her books are out of bounds. She employs a strangely possessive attitude to novels, so much so that she doesn't like to lend them "in case they bend the spine". I find 10 books that I'm happy to never see again, but the challenge is harder than I thought. I suffer from "you never know when you might need it", especially when it comes to non-fiction, which doesn't exactly match the spirit of collaborative consumption.

As it happens, after a week no one has requested any of my books. Adding my unwanted copy of The Da Vinci Code to the 167 Dan Brown novels already on offer has probably earned me the karma I deserve. An early lesson of collaborative consumption is that it mimics Newton's third law of motion, namely that you tend to get out of it what you put in.