[WEEK 3] Collaborative Consumption & Benefits

What Is Collaborative Consumption?

When a community gets together through organized sharing, swapping, bartering, trading, gifting and renting  to get the same pleasures of ownership with reduced personal cost and burden, and lower environmental impact.

Definition Of Collaborative Consumption

The term collaborative consumption is used to describe the cultural and economic force away from "hyper-consumption" to re-invented economic models of sharing, swapping, bartering, trading or renting that have been enabled by advances in social media and perr-to-peer online platform.

The Benefits Of Collaborative Consumption 

The concept of collaborative consumption offers a variety of benefits. It generally reduces costs for the renter or borrower and helps the owner of an item pay for its maintenance. The benefits of collaborative consumption include:

• Reducing carbon foot print by sharing transportation and assets.
• Saving costs by borrowing and recycling items
• Increasing happiness and contentment due to positive social interactions.
• Opportunities provides to build closer, stronger relationships with their customer base and the community.
• Collaborative consumption business model generates long-term income from each items, rather than one time earnings that rely upon frequent sales.
• A group of neighbors share a lawn mower, each person contributes to the cost of maintenance and fuel. This saves money while reducing the amount of storage space people need.
• Vehicle sharing reduces the congestion of roads and parking lots.
• Decreases the need for environmentally harmful mining and logging.
• Reduce the need for individuals to clutter their homes and garage with countless items that they seldom use.  
• Internet companies share the same computer servers.