Why we Built the Circular Library Network

When I moved to Iceland in 2017, I couldn't put up a shelf.

I needed a drill. I couldn't afford to buy one. The secondhand market here didn't really exist yet, and I didn't know about it anyway. So I looked into renting one, and that was too expensive too. I stood there with a shelf I couldn't hang, thinking, this is absurd.

Then it wasn't just the drill. It was the projector I wanted for a movie night with friends, 90,000 króna to buy something I'd use twice a year. It was a dozen other things you couldn't rent, couldn't borrow, and couldn't justify buying. And most of the people I knew in Iceland were foreigners like me, so we didn't have the network to just borrow between ourselves either.

That's when it clicked: if I'm stuck like this, other people must be too.

The oldest good idea we have

Most of us don't need to own most of what we own. Nobody needs a power drill sitting in a cupboard 364 days a year. We've built an entire economy around everyone individually buying, storing, and eventually binning the same objects. Millions of near-identical things, used for minutes, then forgotten. It's expensive for people and it's brutal on the planet.

A library already solved this centuries ago. Share a resource, and everyone gets more from less. I couldn't find a single reason we shouldn't do the same with tools, projectors, and camping gear, the stuff of everyday life. So I set out to build one.

I'd trained in conservation and restoration, historic objects and buildings. I'd spent years learning how to make old things last, how to repair instead of replace. Looking at how we treat everyday stuff, buy cheap, use once, throw away, I couldn't unsee it. We'd forgotten how to keep things in use.

I built the first version from a hospital bed

Here's the part I don't dress up, because the real version matters more than the tidy one.

I flew to Toronto to learn. I cold-called their tool library and asked if I could just hang out and see how they ran things. The director said everyone tells him they'll visit and nobody ever does. I showed up. Crashed on his sofa for a week. Toronto has four tool libraries, and I learned everything I could: how they manage volunteers, how repair works, how the whole thing actually runs.

I also started getting very sick in Toronto, and didn't know why. I landed back in Iceland and went straight into hospital. That's where I found out I have an autoimmune disease. No cure. Something I'll live with for the rest of my life, with a shorter timeline than most people get.

You have two options in that situation. Feel sorry for yourself, or find something to focus on. My body was wrecked but my mind wouldn't switch off, so from the hospital bed I built a genuinely shitty website and launched a crowdfunding campaign. By the time I was discharged, we were halfway funded. Which meant I now had to deliver, because people had put their money in.

In 2018, the Reykjavík Tool Library, Munasafn, opened. Our first donation was someone saying they had "a couple of boxes" for us. The floor ended up covered in boxes: over 500 items. We cleaned them, fixed them, lent them out. We ran repair cafés once a month, and we still do.

The problem nobody warns you about

Here's what running a tool library taught me that I wish I'd known at the start: the idea is bulletproof, but the way we run these places is fragile.

Almost every tool library survives on a little grant money and a lot of passionate volunteers. That's the trap. Grants run out. And volunteers burn out, or get hurt in the process, or start to feel taken advantage of. I've watched it happen, and I've made that mistake myself: run a project on unpaid people, and eventually good people walk away exhausted. That has to change.

From the start I did one thing differently. I paid people. We ran the tool library with employees, not volunteers. But paying people made the fragility even clearer: without stable funding, the whole thing wobbles. During COVID we had to move locations five times. It was survival mode.

That's the moment the Circular Library Network was really born. Not because the tool library thrived, but because I could see exactly where it strained.

Infrastructure, not heroics

During COVID I called two friends from the tool library, (Kristofer Henry - one of the volunteers of Reddinggakaffi who became a good friend, and Sebastian, who was a member of the tool library but also someone enbeded in the Reykjavik Grassroots movement) with a slightly mad idea: what if we automated this into a self-checkout system? I reached out to Gene at myTurn, who'd been in libraries-of-things software for over 20 years, and asked if I could automate it. He said people had tried; if I could pull it off, go for it.

The three of us spent about a year and a half building it, funded by a small grant. The first prototype is still running in Kópavogur library today. It works.

So we split things in two. The nonprofit stays a nonprofit in Iceland, running the repair cafés and the community work through our circular economy centre. And the Circular Library Network became a tech company that gives other people the hardware and software to run their own sharing stations.

Because that's the whole point: automate the boring parts so the human parts can survive. Let people hand the inventory, the bookings, the payments, and the 24/7 access over to a system, so they can spend their energy on the repair cafés and the workshops, the things that actually build community. Passion starts these places. Infrastructure keeps them alive.

Usership, not ownership

People assume the greenest thing you can do is buy secondhand. It helps, but honestly, secondhand is just another version of getting high on buying something. You still get the hit at the till, and the item still eventually ends up in landfill. It's better consumption, but it's still consumption.

What I care about is usership instead of ownership. Keep the thing whole, in use, shared, in the loop, for as long as possible. Every time you pull something out of that loop, the loop shrinks. My whole aim is the opposite: get more from less.

A lot of this comes down to ego, if we're honest. "I must have the best drill so I can drill the best hole." If you use drills every day, fine, buy the best one. But if you need it once a year to hang a shelf, like I did, you don't need to own it. We can buy the best one and share it. That's a change of mindset, and mindsets move slowly. But they move.

Where we are now

Today the Circular Library Network gives communities the hardware, software, and white-label apps to run their own libraries of things. Locally branded, in their own language, managed by them but connected to each other. We're in 21 locations across Iceland, Canada, Germany, and Switzerland, and growing.

It started with one person who couldn't hang a shelf. It turned into infrastructure for sharing.

I consistently fall upwards, my dad says. Always a plan B, then a plan C, because most of the time the first plan doesn't work and you go again. That's how we got here, and it's how we'll keep going. If you've ever looked at everything we buy, use once, and throw away and thought there has to be a better way, there is. We've built the tools to make it real.

Want to start a library of things in your community? See how it works, or learn what a library of things actually is, explore our software, and the smart hardware that keeps it running around the clock.

Anna De Matos, Founder & CEO, Circular Library Network