Why are all these storage units popping up?
or, my case for a Library of Stuff | March 2023
Well before i found the rabbit hole on the Left side of Youtube, i had thought about ways to reduce waste. Specifically, the waste that comes from everyone owning EVERYTHING. To use an example from Andrewism, let’s look at the simple case of a shovel. How many of us own a shovel? (i personally don’t because i don’t own a home, and maybe most of you don’t if you’re in a similar situation as me) buuuttt we can imagine that many who do own their own home and take care of their own yard do, in fact, own a shovel. Now, how often does this hypothetical family we are imagining actually use said shovel? Okay, maybe they’re putting in some pavers in the driveway, so they’ve been using it every day for the past month (does it take a month to put in pavers?) Anyways, they use the shovel for that one month, 30 days out of the year. Let’s then be generous (as we already have been with the amount of time it took for our family to put in pavers) and say that some unexpected leak comes up in the sprinkler system requiring one additional day of use of the shovel for each month of the year (you might need a new sprinkler system at that point, my fellow human). So our imaginary family has used the shovel 30+11 or 41 days of the 365 days of the year, which is 11% of the year. The other 89% of the year, that shovel sits idle in the garage. Now, how much work went into making that shovel for it to sit idle for that long? Now, how much work went into making the 12 shovels for the homes on our imaginary family’s street for them to sit idle that long? Now, wouldn’t it make more sense for the imaginary family in our scenario to share a shovel between the 12 homes on that street? All this, and we’re looking at something as simple as a shovel, at least when we start considering blowers, mowers, wackers, and the menagerie of other lawn care equipment (which itself brings up its own considerations — from 2006!).
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Now, to bring it back to storage units. At least from my perspective far in the southeast corner of the US, there seems to be a lot of large building space being dedicated to storing our stuff. My utopian brain, though, would like to see these large storage units not used for personal use, but rather for collective use. Need to mow your lawn because your in-laws are coming over and you don’t want to appear to be a millennial slob? No problem, just head on over to La Bibliothèque de Trucs (The Library of Stuff, because all great ideas are French, right?) and check out a mower for the day. Just be sure to bring it back by this weekend.
And wouldn’t you know it, great minds sure do think alike. Because here’s something that i only had envisioned in my head made into reality by someone over in the UK. And here it is again!
Obviously, this is not a particularly mainstream idea, and not one that would thrive in a profit-centered economy. And there’s many obstacles to be worked out here (i mean a book is one thing, but how do you ensure someone returns a lawnmower or a car?). But i do appreciate Andrewism, Breadtube, and this bloke over across the pond for helping me realize i’m not crazy (or maybe we’re just all crazy together 😅) and for pushing the limits of what we as a society could do together.
