The Future of Buying is On-Demand
How many times do you use your lawn mower in one year? A dozen at most? Yet most people with a lawn own a lawn mower that’s taking up a big bit of space in their garage or home somewhere. The same goes for random tools that we may not use often such as a bread maker, or an air pump, or a hedge cutter.
All of us have items in our home that we use very rarely that spend most of their time sitting doing nothing. Yet these objects have each taken up natural resources and energy to manufacture and to transport to you.
This is incredibly bad for the environment as almost every household has items that they very rarely use. When we multiply that by the billions of homes in the world then we have billions of unused items in existence that just get replaced by more and more unused items during their life cycle.
Not only is this a massive waste of the planet’s resources it’s also a bit waste of personal space. These items are often big and take up a lot of space to store in homes that are also normally limited in space to start with.
The future solution is to move away from a system of buying objects to one of accessing them on demand. A sort of Netflix for products if you will.
This service would allow you to pay a fee for using certain items for set periods of time and include same day delivery and also collection either once you’d used your item or your time to use it runs out. This is a service that isn’t too far away from how we have started to consume our media content. We have gone from buying cassettes and VHS tapes, to buying CDs and DVDs, to streaming over the internet on services such as Netflix, Spotify and Amazon. We no longer directly own most of the media we consume, the movies and music we watch and listen to each day. Now it’s time for our consumption of physical items to evolve in the same way we have evolved our use of media content.
There is nothing presently stopping companies from offering products on demand. The rise of same day delivery companies makes this a viable option for a future service. If everyone pays for subscriptions to have access to the products they need for set periods of time then it would be a profitable service.
Transitioning to an on-demand subscription model for using items will help reduce the amount of materials we use, as we won’t have to manufacture anywhere near as many objects, since not everyone will be using them at the same time. Instead of needing 50 million lawn mowers we might perhaps only need quarter of a million or less lawn mowers. This is a massive reduction in the use of materials and is a much more sustainable way of using our planet’s resources.
Of course there are limitations to a service like this. The most obvious limitation is that not every item you use in your life will be something you want to get through an on-demand subscription. Things like cookers and fridge freezers are in constant use and are difficult to install. An on-demand items subscription service is primarily for items that we don’t use often but are portable e.g. a lawn mower, a popcorn maker, a bread maker, a wheelbarrow, a spade, an air pump, a bicycle.
Another two clear obstacles would come from manufacturers of products and businesses that sell products. I can imagine they won’t be too happy when all of a sudden people aren’t buying their products anywhere near as much as before. This will cause some pushback at first from these companies, but in time they will adapt and start their own on-demand product services. Plus there will always be items to sell that aren’t viable for on-demand product subscriptions such as cookers, musical instruments (that are used often,) and vacuums. As well as items for practical and decorative uses such as lamps and paintings. So shops won’t be made completely redundant.
One other major issue that I can imagine people would highlight is the amount of energy it takes to pick up and deliver billions of products to people per year. The solution to this is electric vehicles. Using a fleet of electric vehicles powered by electricity from 100% renewable power sources will make this effectively a carbon neutral service. These vehicles would also be used for regular deliveries of bought goods so they would have already existed in the first place.
Alongside the problems we currently face as a planet to do with tackling climate change we also are going to be faced with increasing problems to do with living space. Most people want to live in cities due to the economic and social advantages they afford us. The problem with this is that there’s only so much living space in cities and even as they grow, space becomes more and more limited in an attempt to pack as many people into a city as possible.
A city has limits to the size it can practically become in order to stay functional. For example if a city became so big that it took up the space of an entire region it no longer can be classed as a city. A city needs to have limits in order for people to be able to practically travel around it. This is where the space problem comes in. We need ways to save space in our city homes that have limited space. On-demand product subscription services offer part of a solution to this.
Another key advantage of a service like this is that it can actively repair the products that its customers use. Now when we use items that break we tend to get rid of them and replace them. Repairing them often isn’t done but is a waste of resources as many products that could be easily repaired are sent to landfill. With an on-demand product service the company has an opportunity to maintain and repair any products after they are used. This is a far more sustainable model than what we use now.
In order to save our world we need innovative solutions. Offering on-demand product services will help us to use less of the world’s resources, save us living space, and make sure products are repaired instead of being binned.
