Chapter 07 · Materials & footprintsCircular Economy & Materials
Collaborative consumption
Definition
Collaborative consumption describes systems that prioritise access over ownership — sharing, bartering, lending, trading, renting and gifting — enabled by network technologies. The term was coined in a 1978 paper by Marcus Felson and Joe Spaeth and popularised by Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers in their 2010 book What's Mine Is Yours.
References
Supports definition and framing.
Overview
What it means
It reframes consumption around utilisation of idle capacity — the spare room, the parked car, the seldom-used drill.
How it is used
The concept underpins product-service systems, peer-to-peer rental platforms and tool libraries; academic work maps its overlapping definitions and boundaries.
Why it matters
Done well, it can reduce material throughput; critics note that large platforms often monetise rather than dematerialise consumption.