In a world grappling with the challenges of climate change, it has become essential to establish sustainable practices in all areas of life. The culture of excessive consumption must be left behind. One sustainable approach to this is the sharing economy, which we are investigating in the SharE Green project. This involves calculating CO2 savings by encouraging the rental of items instead of purchasing them.
The calculation of CO2 savings via a counter is the focus of SharE Green. This counter is designed to calculate the CO2 savings achieved when items are rented instead of purchased. The underlying algorithm considers various factors such as raw material extraction, provision to production facilities, manufacturing, assembly, distribution to points of sale, and transport during the rental process. Through concrete figures, based on manufacturer information, among other things, SharE Green enables people to recognize their direct contribution to reducing their carbon footprint. The counter is used on a Hamburg-based rental platform – fainin[1].
In addition, a consolidated record of the entire rental platform community is to be created to foster a sense of community and demonstrate the CO2 savings they have achieved together. The counter is intended to operate in real time by having direct access to the rental platform’s database and thus all transactions. For an appealing presentation, data visualizations are being sought that show CO2 savings, for example, over time. The resulting project data, such as the calculation model for CO2 savings, will be made open source after the project’s completion in order to integrate it into other rental platforms, for example, and to create transparency.
We are dealing with products that are rented and used by multiple users throughout their lifetime. Therefore, the cradle-to-gate CO2 emissions [2] per product cannot be directly extracted from the database. Renting a product once is certainly less carbon-intensive than buying a brand new one, but to calculate the exact emissions from product rentals, the average annual usage and the lifetime of the item were taken into account. The rental platform fainin[1] is supporting us as a partner in the project and provides us with the transaction data. Furthermore, the CO2 counter is being tested in practice on this platform.
References
[1] https://www.fainin.com [2] Souto-Martinez, A.; Arehart, J. H. & Srubar III, W. V. (2018). Cradle-to-gate CO2e emissions vs. in situ CO2 sequestration of structural concrete elements. In: Energy and Buildings (167:15), pp. 301-311. DOI: 10.1016/j.enbuild.2018.02.042