Thrift Week 2022, Day Seven: Share Stuff

And so we come at last to the final tenet of the Ecofrugal Manifesto...

Ecofrugal Principle #7: Share Stuff

When I say "stuff" here, I mean material things. It's nice, of course, to share feelings, or to share household responsibilities, or to share your wealth with others through charity, but none of that has much to do with ecofrugality. But sharing goods — that is, having one car, or one office, or one copy of a book for multiple people, rather than separate ones for each person — has everything to do with ecofrugality. Many people sharing one object means less cost for each person, and less cost for the earth than producing many copies of the same object.

Some examples of this include:

• Public libraries, which allow everyone in town to share the same books and videos 
• Other types of community "libraries" for sharing tools, toys, or seeds and seedlings
• Community gardens, which allow multiple people to garden on the same plot of land
• Ride sharing (other people giving you rides in their cars, so you don't need to own one), car sharing (many people sharing a fleet of cars, so they don't all need their own), and bike sharing (the same thing for bicycles)
• Coworking spaces, which allow people with different schedules to make use of the same office space
  

Of all the ecofrugal principles on my list, this is the one Brian and I personally make the least use of. We share with each other, of course, by having just one car, one TV, one tablet, and so on for the two of us. But we don't have as many opportunities as we'd like to share stuff with people outside our household. We do make extensive use of our local library, but we don't have access to any of the other cool "libraries" some towns have to offer, nor to a car sharing or bike sharing system that might allow us to do without a car or bike of our own. We have our own garden, so we don't have any need to join our local community garden. And even our local community cafe has now, sadly, converted to a normal payment model.

If I could change just one thing about our lifestyle, I think I'd like to have more opportunities to share stuff with our neighbors. It's not mainly about money (though we do, as I've calculated, save quite a lot by using the library, the one shared public resource available to us). And even the environmental benefits, though those could be significant, are secondary. What I really feel like we're missing out on is the opportunity to meet and interact with our neighbors, most of whom we don't really feel like we know. (We made a point of giving each of our next-door neighbors a bag of plums out of the crazy harvest we got last summer, but that was just a one-time exchange.)

Of course, even if we did have access to more shareable resources here in town, we probably wouldn't be allowed to use them right now. At the very least, they'd have safety protocols in place to prevent us from meeting and interacting with our neighbors there. So they wouldn't do much to lighten the social isolation of the pandemic.

But I feel like as 2022 progresses, as the omicron surge starts to ease off, as winter eases into spring and we can once again meet and mingle more outdoors, we should make more of a point of taking advantage of the community resources we do have. We should take more walks in the park, dine out at the outdoor community tables set up in the summer of 2020, go to events like the outdoor film series. In short, we should do all we can to be more involved in the life of our community. Getting to know our neighbors would be an added perk of living ecofrugally — and one that would make it easier to share knowledge about all the other aspects of ecofrugal living, too.