What's the idea?

No need to buy so much stuff - get easy access to world of abundance on your doorstep.

Locality is a local sharing scheme for house and garden equipment, enabling people to search for items in the local area using the internet, and arrange to borrow them for a small fee. Equally, people with items to lend out can make small amounts of money doing so.

By 2022 every new product will have an internet address of its own. This will make inanimate objects easily searchable on the internet. This is the searchable 'internet of things', also known as Web 3.0. Owners who want their possessions to be searchable in this way need only tick a permissions box online at the Locality website. Anything can be registered, from ski-gear to bouncy-castles to food blenders. Locality then organises the borrowing, agreeing the fee, when and where the pick-up takes place and how long the item will be borrowed for.

Free, niche versions of this idea exist already and some are thriving. Future schemes combining micropayments and Web 3.0 will make sharing goods in local communities much easier and more appealing in future.

Why is this a low carbon product?

The manufacture and distribution of equipment such as lawnmowers and barbecues has a significant carbon impact.

An unattributed source told us that powerdrills are only ever used on average for nine minutes in their lifetime. Whether that is apocryphal or not, it is true that much of the equipment we buy is used much less than it could be.

Share schemes provide a way of ensuring that the average powerdrill lies idle for less time - ultimately reducing the total number of powerdrills that need to be manufactured and distributed in the first place - and so reducing carbon dioxide emissions. What's more, by participating in share schemes people have an opportunity to get to know people in their community - the owners of the powerdrill, the bouncy castle or the ski-gear - who otherwise they might not. And by using Locality they will need to make fewer trips to out-of-town stores.

How could Locality fit into our lives in 2022?

If this was a real service, would you be interested?