Data-based investigation of the sustainable impact of a sharing economy using the practical example of a Hamburg rental platform

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In a world struggling with the challenges of climate change, it has become imperative 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 an approach to calculating CO2 savings by promoting the rental of items instead of their purchase.

The calculation of CO2 savings via a counter is the focus of SharE Green. This counter is designed to calculate the CO2 savings that are achieved when items are rented instead of purchased. The underlying algorithm takes into account various factors such as the extraction of raw materials, provision at production sites, manufacture, assembly, distribution to points of sale and transportation during the rental process. SharE Green enables people to recognize their direct contribution to reducing their carbon footprint by providing concrete figures based on manufacturer data, among other things. 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 kept in order to promote a sense of community and show the CO2 savings they have achieved together. The counter should function in real time by having direct access to the rental platform's database and thus all transactions. Data visualizations that show the CO2 savings over time, for example, are intended to provide an appealing presentation. The data generated by the project, such as the calculation model for CO2 savings, will be made available as open source after the project is completed, for example to integrate it into other rental platforms and to create transparency.

We deal with products that are rented and used by several users during their lifetime. Therefore, the cradle-to-gate CO2 emissions [2] per product cannot be taken directly from the database. Renting a product once is certainly less carbon-intensive than buying a completely new one, but to calculate the exact emissions of product rentals, the average use per year and the lifetime of the item were taken into account. The rental platform fainin [1] is our partner in the project and provides us with the transaction data; the CO2 counter is also being tested in practice on this platform.

 
[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

And here the group in their own word (German):