Our consumption model is broken.
The average Westerner owns more than 10.000 goods, 80% of which are used less than 3 times per year. The average drill is only used for 12 minutes in its entire lifetime, and a vacuum cleaner goes unused for 98% of its entire lifespan. These items take huge amounts of energy and raw materials to produce. Yet when our only option is to buy them, these objects sit on shelves, underused and gathering dust in every flat, house and office across Europe.
The sharing economy has the power to change this consumption paradigm. Instead of the vicious cycle of buying (often low-quality) goods that end up in closets and are quickly discarded, we can create a sustainable consumption cycle. This cycle emphasises sharing or renting durable products that are easily accessible to everyone through various access services and can be locally repaired and reused.
The Vicious and Sustainable Consumption Cycles
Sharing stations - the infrastructure for a sharing revolution
Sharing stations are a new form of infrastructure enabling citizens to engage in the sharing economies. A sharing station is a connected locker that holds goods for sharing in residential buildings, public spaces, businesses, etc, making it easy to access goods where they are needed.
Similar to shared bike systems, a user selects and reserves the goods on their phone, collecting it and putting the goods back into the station after use. Access to these goods is shared by multiple users, who can rent the items only when they need them.
Sharing stations have the power to make the access economy more convenient, visible and fun in cities. Compared to existing solutions, they provide a simple, reliable and cost-efficient service to access goods for a short amount of time in the city.
Digital Kiosks is preparing cities for the large-scale deployment of sharing stations
A European-wide alliance of municipalities, housing providers, research organisations, business support organisations, and European networks has united to accelerate the use of sharing stations across Europe.
Digital Kiosks partners will co-create, test, and evaluate new use cases, operating and business models for sharing stations. Funded by the Interreg North Sea programme, the €3.66m initiative is the first Europe-wide collaboration to build local sharing ecosystems through the co-creation, testing and evaluation of sharing stations to drive local sharing economy strategies for cities and housing associations.
Over the next three years, the Digital Kiosks initiative will:
- Deploy 22 sharing stations in seven countries (France, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark and Norway), tested by at least 5,000 end-users throughout the project
- Produce a Sharing Station Implementation Guide to advise any public authority or organisation interested in implementing sharing stations
- Design a Digital Kiosks Innovation Framework, a guideline document supporting the sustainable large-scale deployment of sharing stations
- Create a Community Engagement Toolkit for planning citizen engagement in the co-creation of sharing stations. It will cover the design, implementation, operation, and evaluation of sharing stations to understand citizens’ needs
- Grow the Digital Kiosks network, already includingmore than 30 sharing station providers, municipalities, housing providers, universities, and NGOs working together to support the sustainable implementation and commercialisation of sharing stations
Digital Kiosks is an Interreg North Sea project co-funded by the European Union.
Project start: May 2024