In the last few decades our material consumption has increased enormously, and with it, so has our production of waste. There are many statistics demonstrating that we are throwing away far too much stuff. Here is one of them: the electronic waste that’s discarded each year weighs more than all the commercial aircraft ever built.

That’s a lot of waste being produced every single year. And it is currently only providing part of the world’s population with a good material quality of life. If everyone else attains a similar level of consumption in the same way and we keep it going for another generation or two, the world will begin to resemble a gigantic rubbish dump. Something is going to have to change.

An essential element of solving this problem is simply using less stuff. We are already using immense amounts of resources, but there are still billions of people in poverty. For everyone in the world to have access to enough material goods, we will need to share that access much more effectively.

Looking at this issue as being about people having enough access to goods rather than owning those goods themselves is a powerful way of framing the issue that opens up a whole new set of solutions. The Toronto Tool Library is one of the pioneers of one such solution: libraries of things.

Libraries of things are exactly what they sound like; they are just like book libraries, except that instead of stocking books, they stock things. Tool libraries are a specific subset of libraries of things that specialise in tools. Toronto Tool Library is one of these. For a small annual fee, members can have access to many thousands of tools when they need them.

Read the full article about tool libraries by Paddy Le Flufy at Resilience.