Plastic waste. Tick. Coffee cup waste. Tick. Plastic straws. Tick. We’ve been pretty on the money over the last year, reporting on the growing eco-issues so it’s a no brainer to consider what trying to decrease our electronic waste would look like. Could an innovative sharing system like Fat Lama help?
Georgina Wilson-Powell
Mon 22 Jan 2018
The UN calls it e-waste, the stuff we all have that’s cluttering up cupboards and lingering in landfill. That printer that never worked properly that was cheaper to get a new one. The plastic coated dumbbells you used once in January three years ago. All that adds up to throwing away 50 million tonnes of e-waste in this year alone.
Fat Lama is using our growing love of the sharing economy to help reduce e-waste. It acts like an on-demand Air BnB for stuff (and we’ve already talked how innovative fashion retailers are all about borrowing their clothes rather than buying them).
The Fat Lama team hard at work
It’s essentially a peer to peer rental service for the kind of stuff you use once a year. From decks to drones, camera lenses to climbing equipment, you borrow what you need for a daily rate from someone who lives nearby. There’s a whole section for musical instruments, another for camping (no more buying tents that only see the light of day once every three years), you can even borrow caravans and kids’ toys.
Fat Lama launched in November 2016 (which makes it birthday mates with us) and has 50,000 people using it in London alone.
“The environmental impacts of the stuff-sharing economy have been stifled by a lack of insurance provision” to date - however, by insuring lenders for up to £25,000 per item, Fat Lama has unlocked new potential in the sharing economy - the exchange of high-end electrical goods,” explains CEO Chaz Englander.
So now you can make money and rent your stuff out or save money and borrow existing stuff, without having to add to the pile of broken things and you'll have more space at home.
