A Lending Library allows citizens to borrow… well, anything. It’s emerging as an increasingly popular cost-saving, community-boosting, emission-reducing stalwart of the sharing economy.
Could there be a greater neighbourly gesture than sharing your possessions?
Lending someone an item that you own is to trust them to use it responsibly and that they’ll return it in acceptable condition, especially if it has monetary or sentimental value.
Informal lending and borrowing like this, without payment, is considered non-commercial sharing. According to the ProShare research project, it is especially common in superdiverse communities, such as those with a high proportion of people with migrant backgrounds. These households have, on average, lower incomes than nationals – although the wealth gap differs, being much wider in Europe than in the United states.
We can deduce that the cost-saving of not having to buy an item drives the practice, although the research also observes that it has real social significance. Sharing household objects, skills, or services (such as translating or child sitting, ProShare points out) provides opportunities for social interactions, which supports community-building, happiness, wellbeing, and a sense of belonging.
With that in mind, it’s good to know that sharing is increasingly popular, and some cities are formalising the practice to open it up to new audiences. So, what’s the appeal of a Lending Library and how exactly does one work?
What is a Lending Library?
Also called a Sharing Library, this is one of the tools we have available to encourage and expand – even mainstream – a borrowing culture.
Much like a traditional book library, a Lending Library is a repository of items that can be borrowed temporarily – usually by signed-up members – except that what’s lent out is much more diverse.
What’s on offer can seem like a random mix of products, and each library will offer a unique selection.
This formalises the lending process somewhat. It doesn’t have to be that way. From Austria to Australia, public bookshelves are now a common sight; someone leaves a book they no longer want for interested passers-by to take for free.
Like non-commercial sharing, the location and stock of Public Bookshelves is highly unpredictable. A Sharing Library, on the other hand, will operate from a centralised location, have regular opening hours, a tracking and (in many cases) booking system for the inventory, and often membership fees.
Not all charge for membership, but even where they do, this is often a much more affordable alternative to buying items new – or even second-hand. It can be a highly affordable option for accessing products that get used infrequently.
Other benefits of borrowing include, removing the need to store items at home, and giving people the chance to try out a product before buying their own.
The Sharing Economy vs the Circular Economy
Research by Shareable reveals that, globally, there were about 2,000 formally-run lending libraries in 2024 and a great many informal versions which are hard to quantify.
This is a big win for the climate. Why?
By now we’ve all heard of the circular economy. That’s when we reuse products, possibly after repairs or upcycling. This disrupts the linear make-use-dispose model, easing demand for raw material extraction, keeping waste out of landfill, and reducing manufacturing – one of the world’s biggest greenhouse gas-emitting sectors.
The sharing economy works in much the same way, except it doesn’t require the repairing stage for a product to be ready for reuse. And it further reduces calls for manufacturing, as multiple people use a single item,
It also pays off. In 2015, the sharing economy was predicted to be worth $335 billion USD by 2025, up from $15 billion USD in 2013. In actual fact, in 2024 it was valued at $366 billion USD, with a projection of $1 trillion USD by the end of the decade.
Sure, these figures are dominated by giants of the sharing economy, like AirBnB and Uber. But community sharing libraries have an increasingly popular stake in this picture.
The aptly named Library of Things in the UK, for example, leant out items 10,065 times in just twelve months, saving the equivalent of 124 tonnes of CO2 and 64 tonnes of waste.
Blueprint of a Lending Library
There’s no typical format for a Lending Library.
The aforementioned UK example partners with well-known household brands to rent out the same 45 as-new quality products across a network of 21 locations – similar to a franchise.
In some cases, the library doesn’t stock a range of products at all, but specialise. These are named appropriately:
- Tool library
- Toy library
- Seed library
- Musical instrument library
- Board games library
There are plenty of examples too of sharing libraries making efficient use of minimum spaces. The Oxford Library of Things in the UK is cramped into a utility room-sized corner of Aristotle House, an events space populated by social enterprises. It’s not ideal for catching the eye of passers-by, but for anyone who knows it’s there, the well-stacked shelves are a treasure trove of borrowable items, from power tools to anything you’d need for a party.
The library can even be mobile, like this one from Devon, UK, which also offers free membership to low-income households to remove barriers to access.
Usually, a Lending Library is open to the public, but there are those that have a closed community, such as a company providing one for its employees, or the one researcher Francesca Boni established for students on the campus of Università Bocconi in Milan, Italy.
Get Started – Considerations for a New Sharing Library
Whether motivated by a community spirit, the chance to save money, or a need to reduce CO2, the good news is that it can be pretty straightforward to set up a Lending Library.
It’s not effortless, though. You should give the following variable some consideration:
- Community selection – is the Lending Library intended for us by the general public, a target demographic, or a closed group (such as your company employees)?
- Location – where will your audience likely engage a lending station, whether by seeking it out or by chance encounter?
- Opening times – does the location allow access at the times and days that suits your user group? Even automated kiosks may be stationed inside a building that closes for part of the day.
- Stakeholders – who are you going to pal up with to make it happen? Can you pull it off alone, with one or two well-meaning locals, or do you need the cooperation of property owners, politicians, and IT experts, etc?
- Membership model – by all means simplify the sign-up process, but should there be a fee to subscribe, and do you charge per item borrowed?
- Borrowing policy – how many goods can an individual take out at once, and for how long? Is there a penalty if they damage or fail to return the inventory?
- Operational processes – is the system for booking, collecting, and returning items automated or does it require personnel interaction? How can we ensure systems do not alienate people with little technical knowledge?
A few points deserve a little more attention.
Inventory
What kind of items you’re going to stock will probably depend on your target audience. It’s unlikely that a trampoline would do well in a library set up in a home for seniors, whereas board games may prove to be very popular.
The truth is, we shouldn’t assume. Francesca says that it’s the target audience who should determine the inventory. At the university, they did this by responding to a simple survey; at the seniors’ home, the care staff could sit down and ask them; in a school, ids could be asked to write down suggestions then have a vote in class, etc.
Obtaining the items you need may not be quite as easy, assuming there’s no budget for it. But that’s no guarantee…
Anna de Matos is the founder and CEO of the Circular Library Network, an automated Sharing Library infrastructure provider from Reykjavik, Iceland. Every single one of their 2,000+ items was donated by the community on the back of an appeal. Every donor was compensated with a one-year membership.
Accessibility
There are certain risks – or at least potential uncertainties – present in non-commercial borrowing, Anna warns. These range from navigating the time constraints of the lender to personal security. “As a woman, I would never go to a random man’s house to borrow a drill,” she says.
In the case of automated lending stations, it would be sensible to place them in a crowded and well-lit area to make customers feel safer.
Putting them inside buildings can be good for insurance purposes, but limit opening times. However, Anna laughs off the proposal that a Sharing Library should be accessible round the clock. “People need to move on from that concept,” she said. “I’ve never met someone that needed it [to borrow a tool] at 3AM.”
Terms & Conditions
But what if someone just sees a Lending Library as a cheap way of acquiring a good quality pressure washer, for example?
It’s all taken care of in the terms and conditions members agree to, which is the responsibility of the hosting organisation.
Anna says that no one has ever returned an item late to the Icelandic system. Penalty fees can be a deterrent, as can charging to replace missing items. But it seems that customers really care for the items they borrow. Anna suggests that this is possibly because many of them have donated items – a case of: treat others as you’d like to be treated.
Francesca has seen this in action elsewhere. The student Lending Library in Milan is heavily influenced by Leila, a provider in Bologna where members can borrow as many items – for free – as they donate, so everyone has that emotional attachment to the items on offer.
Lending Libraries in a Nutshell
There may be many angles to consider getting a Sharing Library off the ground, but it’s undeniably a tangible and impactful tool for social cohesion and for reducing pressures on the environment. Municipalities would be wise to make the service an extension of their regular libraries, but where there’s a lack of initiative among the authorities, this is a project communities can take by the horns.
For more on the stories from Reykjavik and Milan, containing more insights into the processes and tech that these libraries have made use of, head to our companion article.