Sustainability Language

Circular Economy & Materials

Collaborative consumption

An economic model in which people access goods and services through sharing, swapping, renting or lending rather than individual ownership.

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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

Springer

Felson & Spaeth 1978 origin; definitional landscape

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.

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