Day 30: Why the sharing economy isn’t dead and never will be.

I’m writing this with my laptop perched precariously on my lap as I drive around London in a van collecting rubbish. And how I came to be here is a tale that is straight out of the sharing economy — a serendipitous connection that happened at a pub, when I bought a round of drinks. The only other person drinking beer was Mike and we started talking about what we do. I told him about the experiment and he told me about his work picking up food waste to be distributed to people who need it — the sharing economy in action.

One of the ways in which the sharing economy succeeds so beautifully is in its efficient distribution of idle resources. Rooms that would’ve stayed empty get rented out on Airbnb. Cars that would have stayed by the curb get driven thanks to car sharing platforms like Car Next Door or Zip car. But what about one of the biggest idle resources we have, and one that is wreaking havoc on our environment — Food Waste.

Food Waste is a huge and complex issue, and while I would love to dig into this more 1.John Oliver did a great segment on Last Week Tonight and 2. Everyone should visit Love Food Hate Waste .

Now food excess for households is a terrible waste of resources but it doesn’t cost us anything (in my mind maybe it should). But for retailers and restaurants food waste can be a costly exercise as it must be removed. In fact Bruce who I met today told me that from his business school the person who became the millionaire first was the guy with the waste management business — trash it seems is big bucks.

And this is where Bruce and the company he is one of the directors of –City Harvest come in. They are aiming to tackle this food waste problem by charging the restaurant or retailer to remove part of their food waste (Bruce told me for one chain their food waste bill is 6 figures a year). Plus they have the added advantage of knowing that the food is being re-distributed to people who need it. And the flow on effect of this action is not insignificant. It improves employee moral as staff know that the food they work so hard to prepare, present or produce isn’t just being thrown away. It also allows the restaurant or retailer to talk about their sustainability policy which is increasingly becoming an important issue with shoppers and diners. Charging for this service allows City Harvest to pay drivers such as Mike who visits partner retailers and restaurants and collects their waste food delivering it either to Soup Kitchens, Food Banks or refugee aid. City Harvest also work with non-food waste, and Bruce was telling me about how they picked up tons of non-prescription medical suppliers (salves, panadols, sanitary products etc) and organized for them to be distributed to refugee camps both here and in Iraq, and how they picked up a whole lot of tents, sleeping bags and parkers from Pinewood Studios that were used for the filming of the movie Everest and sent them to Calais for the refugees.

So today I joined Mike on his rounds and our first stop is Fulham where we pick up some bread. Really nice bread, some of it gluten free that I would pay up £4 for. The next stop a shop in a Tescos where we pick up a tray of beautiful cakes and slices (and it’s well past lunchtime and so hard to resist the urge to grab something off the tray). Our last stop is another health food store this time in Kensington right on the high street and getting to the delivery dock is difficult and we have to wait our turn. We circle the square again and again waiting as different deliveries and pick ups are made. Finally we get inside and I am confronted by the sheer amount of blue ‘Food Waste Only’ bins. I can see now the money that must get spent on taking all of this away and disposing of it. Mike inspects the haul and asks about the bread. It seems that today our waiting in line has made us too late, and the bread has ended up in the bin. What a waste.

Today Mike heads back to The Upper Room a charity with the mission of providing meals, training and jobs for the homeless and vulnerable people in West London. I get to meet the wonderful and flamboyant chef and he proudly shows me the frozen supplies that they have managed to get from partner organizations such as Nando’s and Black Island Studios (who are actually a TV commercial production house who donate the meat they don’t use after filming commercials — the chef reckons the last lot was £1500 of prime meat). It looks like it is going to be an amazing meal, and tonight when I finally get to sit down with everyone — it is.

But the day doesn’t end there and I head back to the last thing I will do in the Sharing Economy in the month of September — stay on a boat on the Thames. This is even more impressive when I tell you that it is a 2 storey boat! But with most things with the sharing economy it ends up being much more than just a quirky Airbnb stay. I get to meet Martin an architect who is fighting the council to keep his beloved boat community safe from developers. It seems that everyone has their fight to keep their community whole .

I can’t help but get reflective on the month that has been. I have learnt so much about the sharing economy, technology and the distribution of resources but most of all I have learnt about human nature, and I have come to this one conclusion. We are happiest when we share. Whether it is a smile on the tube, or a room in our house, or our last scrap of food, I believe that human beings are designed to be co-operative, and to work together in tribes.

Where our sharing mentality falls down is that our tribes have got small and confusing. We see people as ‘other’ instead of from our own tribe, and the only thing that can fix that is connection. By sharing a smile, or a story we realize that we are all intrinsically the same. We have the same fears, the same joys, the same needs. And when we realize this, it is easy to share.

While this last month has been exhausting, it has also been exhilarating, and I finish it with a greater faith in humanity than I had before, and I think I am not alone. 100 years ago we had faith in god or in our rulers, which was replaced by faith in capitalism and the corporation. But with global recessions and the exorbitant profits of big business, I think we are losing our faith. Even more sad, capitalism has made us competitors, competing with each other to keep from being on the bottom of the heap. Now we are at a point where we need to have faith in each other. The sharing economy offers us so much more than a simple economic equation, it creates meaning between us and it allows us integrity. Seeing people being fed and cared for today with the resources that others had been willing to pay to get rid of, underlined the true value of the sharing economy’s efficient distribution of idle resources.

Sharing is part of human nature, and the sharing economy is simply a new term for something that has been going on since the dawn of time. The sharing economy isn’t dead, and can’t die because it sharing is a part of all of us.

*There will be one more post this week where I will check the numbers and post an analysis of what I have been able to save and earn in a month in the sharing economy.