Everything, everyone, everywhere all at once: How modelling and assessing household product consumption can reveal opportunities for a sustainable sharing economy

Conference poster, 2024

Research promises that the sharing economy (SE) can increase the resource efficiency and reduce the carbon footprints related to household product consumption. However, a main hinder to achieve the sustainability potential of the SE is understanding whether sharing leads to reduced consumption of newly manufactured products, or whether consumption remains unchanged or even increases. Therefore, the sustainability value of the SE is still largely unknown, with a lack of studies that address the role of consumption for the performance of sharing. This poster will summarize my PhD thesis work, which has the aim of modelling and assessing household product consumption, alongside sharing behaviors and attitudes, to identify how the sharing economy can contribute to dematerialization and climate change mitigation. This work contributes to an increased understanding of the sustainability potential of the SE, and has implications for sustainability governance, urban planning, and for sharing businesses and organizations. Methods used include survey methodology and statistical analysis to appraise user perspectives; urban material flow analysis to model consumption amounts at a neighborhood level, and space syntax assessments to understand the spatial accessibility of existing sharing initiatives. Future work encompasses a systematic literature review containing LCA studies of product sharing, and an analysis of how such studies conceptualize the reduction of consumption. Outcomes for the Gothenburg City case study in Sweden have revealed demographic, product, and geographic patterns. Dematerialization potential is most associated with the population characteristics of gender, age, and education level, and with the product groups of clothes, tools, and hobby items. Geographical patterns show lack of access to sharing initiatives in areas with high product consumption, though areas with high interest in sharing have their needs covered. In future results, it is expected to see what climate change mitigation potential there is for the considered household products.