Usership, Not Ownership: Why Secondhand Isn't Enough

Buying secondhand feels good. That's exactly the problem.

You walk into a charity shop or scroll a resale app, find something you like, and get a little hit of two things at once: the thing itself, and the sense that you did something responsible. You saved an item from landfill. You didn't buy new. Good for you.

I understand the feeling. I just don't think it gets us where we need to go. Because if I'm honest, secondhand is often just another version of getting high on buying something. You still get the rush at the till. The object still eventually ends up in the bin, just a bit later. It's better consumption, but it's still consumption. We've dressed up "buy more stuff" as sustainability and given ourselves a gold star for it.

The word I actually care about is usership

Ownership says: this is mine, it lives in my cupboard, I am responsible for it forever whether I use it or not.

Usership says: I need this thing for the afternoon I'm actually using it, and the rest of the time it belongs to whoever needs it next.

That's the shift. Not from new to secondhand, but from owning to using. One drill, shared across a whole street, does the work of thirty drills that would otherwise sit in thirty separate cupboards gathering dust for 364 days a year. Same holes drilled. A fraction of the stuff made, shipped, stored, and eventually thrown away.

When you own something you barely use, you haven't saved it from waste. You've just moved the waste into your home and pressed pause on it.

The ego problem nobody wants to talk about

Here's the part that makes people uncomfortable, so I'll say it plainly. A lot of our buying is ego.

"I must have the best drill so I can drill the best hole." Do you though? If you work with drills every single day, then yes, absolutely, buy the best one you can afford. It's your trade. But most of us aren't drilling every day. Most of us need a drill once a year to put up a shelf, the way I did when I first moved to Iceland and couldn't afford one at all.

For that shelf, you do not need to own a drill. You certainly don't need to own the best drill. What you need is access to a good one for twenty minutes. And here's the thing that should change how you feel about it: we can buy the best one and share it. Usership doesn't mean settling for worse tools. It often means a whole community gets access to better tools than any one person would buy alone.

Keeping things in the loop

I think about all of this as a loop. An item gets made, and the goal is to keep it moving, in use, in good repair, in someone's hands doing something useful, for as long as physically possible.

Every time we pull something out of that loop, the loop shrinks. Buy a drill, use it once, forget it in a drawer: you've taken it out of the loop. It's technically still "yours," but it's doing nothing for anyone, including you. Recycling, by the way, is also taking it out of the loop. Recycling is the last resort, not the first, because breaking something down and remaking it burns enormous energy. Sharing and repair barely burn any. You keep the thing whole.

The whole point is to get more from less. More shelves hung, more projects finished, more people served, from far fewer objects.

So is sharing actually better than owning?

It is, and my team didn't just assert that, we sat down and calculated it. If you want the numbers behind the argument, the emissions and the real cost comparison, my colleague Steffi ran them in Is Sharing Better Than Owning? We Calculated It. This post is the argument. That one is the evidence.

What I'll add is this: the point isn't to feel bad about the drill in your cupboard. The point is to notice how strange it is that we each bought one. And then to build the thing that makes the better option easy, which is exactly what we do at the Circular Library Network. We give communities the hardware, software, and apps to run their own libraries of things, so borrowing is as easy as buying, and usership stops being the harder choice.

Secondhand keeps the shopping. Usership questions whether we needed to shop at all.

Anna De Matos, Founder & CEO, Circular Library Network