Community

Resisting consumerism

One of the key means by which corporate capitalism meets the profit and growth needs of global businesses is through consumerism. The process is simple: use media and advertising to stoke insecurity and discontent, while presenting marketed products as the "solution." This endless treadmill undermines individual wellness while engulfing the living planet in a conflagration of destruction. The good news is that reducing consumerism not only relieves pressure on the planet, it helps build community and connection, thereby improving personal well-being.

Resisting consumerism Actions
Join or start a tool library.
Expand Action
Join or start a tool library.

Tool libraries offer access to a wide variety of specialty tools, recreation and outdoor equipment, kitchen gadgets, and more – without contributing to an individualist, wasteful and energy-intensive throwaway consumer economy. Tool libraries are also known as lending libraries or libraries of things.

Take action

  • Find a nearby tool library with Local Tools' worldwide map Find Your Local Tool Lending Library.
  • Check your local public library: many host small libraries of things in addition to books.
  • Start a new tool library with Share Starter's kit Start a Tool Library or Library of Things, with tools and templates for nonprofits, social ventures, and public libraries. 
  • If you have tools you rarely or no longer use, donate them to a local tool library.

Get inspired

Join or start a tool library.

Tool libraries offer access to a wide variety of specialty tools, recreation and outdoor equipment, kitchen gadgets, and more – without contributing to an individualist, wasteful and energy-intensive throwaway consumer economy. Tool libraries are also known as lending libraries or libraries of things.

Take action

  • Find a nearby tool library with Local Tools' worldwide map Find Your Local Tool Lending Library.
  • Check your local public library: many host small libraries of things in addition to books.
  • Start a new tool library with Share Starter's kit Start a Tool Library or Library of Things, with tools and templates for nonprofits, social ventures, and public libraries. 
  • If you have tools you rarely or no longer use, donate them to a local tool library.

Get inspired

Join or start a neighborhood sharing network.
Expand Action
Join or start a neighborhood sharing network.

Sharing items with neighbors and friends builds relationships and interdependence, and reduces the environmental impact of buying objects that are rarely used. Recreation and outdoor equipment, tools and kitchen implements are all great candidates for informal sharing networks.

Take action

Get inspired

  • Sharing items is a key aspect of Dama, the traditional gift culture in Mali that forms the backbone of community. Learn more about this philosophy in the Gift Economy page of this Action Guide.
  • The Small Farm Guild in northern Vermont, US, shares farm equipment – cider press, chicken processing equipment, food dehydrator, rototiller, and much more – among local farmers, homesteaders and gardeners.

Join or start a neighborhood sharing network.

Sharing items with neighbors and friends builds relationships and interdependence, and reduces the environmental impact of buying objects that are rarely used. Recreation and outdoor equipment, tools and kitchen implements are all great candidates for informal sharing networks.

Take action

Get inspired

  • Sharing items is a key aspect of Dama, the traditional gift culture in Mali that forms the backbone of community. Learn more about this philosophy in the Gift Economy page of this Action Guide.
  • The Small Farm Guild in northern Vermont, US, shares farm equipment – cider press, chicken processing equipment, food dehydrator, rototiller, and much more – among local farmers, homesteaders and gardeners.
Be part of a gift economy.
Expand Action
Be part of a gift economy.

Gift economies free us to give without an expectation of direct payment, and to receive without feeling indebted. They can help us shift our personal economies from a series of faceless transactions to a web of nurturing relationships. In most societies today, gift economies cannot form the entirety or even majority of our economic transactions. Nonetheless, they can be a vital part of our transition from global to local economies.

Take action

  • Organize a Really Really Free Market – a space for people to get and give away goods completely free of obligations to pay, trade or barter – with Shareable's guide How to start a really really free market.
  • Refuse payment – even in barter – for small goods or services you provide to others in your community. At the same time, explain the gift economy concept. See how long it takes to notice that others are doing the same.
  • Join or start a Buy Nothing Group with the Buy Nothing Project, which facilitates hyper-local gift economies where people offer and request items with no transactions involved. There are more than 5,000 active local groups in 44 countries; if your area doesn't have one yet, the website offers everything you need to get started.
  • Explore the economic, social, psychological, relational, spiritual and cosmological elements of gift economies with Charles Eisenstein's in-depth, self-guided course Living in the Gift.

Get inspired

Be part of a gift economy.

Gift economies free us to give without an expectation of direct payment, and to receive without feeling indebted. They can help us shift our personal economies from a series of faceless transactions to a web of nurturing relationships. In most societies today, gift economies cannot form the entirety or even majority of our economic transactions. Nonetheless, they can be a vital part of our transition from global to local economies.

Take action

  • Organize a Really Really Free Market – a space for people to get and give away goods completely free of obligations to pay, trade or barter – with Shareable's guide How to start a really really free market.
  • Refuse payment – even in barter – for small goods or services you provide to others in your community. At the same time, explain the gift economy concept. See how long it takes to notice that others are doing the same.
  • Join or start a Buy Nothing Group with the Buy Nothing Project, which facilitates hyper-local gift economies where people offer and request items with no transactions involved. There are more than 5,000 active local groups in 44 countries; if your area doesn't have one yet, the website offers everything you need to get started.
  • Explore the economic, social, psychological, relational, spiritual and cosmological elements of gift economies with Charles Eisenstein's in-depth, self-guided course Living in the Gift.

Get inspired

Practice simple living.
Expand Action
Practice simple living.

The cumulative environmental costs of industrial consumer products – from mine to landfill – are astronomical. One of the best ways to reduce our impact is to step away from the destructive pressures of consumerism by consciously choosing to live with less.

Take Action

  • Learn how to "live more on less" with this action plan from The Simplicity Institute, which has many more materials on simple living and resistance to consumerism.
  • Find non-consumerist ways to celebrate holidays – from Christmas to Passover to birthdays – on NewDream.org.
  • Learn about the benefits of downshifting – breaking the work-and-spend cycle – from LowImpact.org.
  • To fight consumerism and help build a “hyper-local gift economy”, find or start a local group of the Buy Nothing Project. Also check out the book by the project’s founders, The Buy Nothing, Get Everything Plan.

Get inspired

Practice simple living.

The cumulative environmental costs of industrial consumer products – from mine to landfill – are astronomical. One of the best ways to reduce our impact is to step away from the destructive pressures of consumerism by consciously choosing to live with less.

Take Action

  • Learn how to "live more on less" with this action plan from The Simplicity Institute, which has many more materials on simple living and resistance to consumerism.
  • Find non-consumerist ways to celebrate holidays – from Christmas to Passover to birthdays – on NewDream.org.
  • Learn about the benefits of downshifting – breaking the work-and-spend cycle – from LowImpact.org.
  • To fight consumerism and help build a “hyper-local gift economy”, find or start a local group of the Buy Nothing Project. Also check out the book by the project’s founders, The Buy Nothing, Get Everything Plan.

Get inspired

Start or join a repair café.
Expand Action
Start or join a repair café.

Creating a space for your community to come together and repair objects is not only a great way to keep waste out of the landfill and reduce consumerism, it can also create intergenerational bonding. At Repair Café events, people with specialized skills and knowledge come together to fix almost anything that's broken, from moth-eaten sweaters to smartphones. Originally started in Amsterdam, the concept has now spread around the world.

Take action

  • Find a repair café near you with Repair Café's links to Community groups in the US, Europe, and Australia. There are many other grassroots communities around the world, too. 
  • Start your own local group with Repair Cafe's Repair Café Manual and templates, offered for a modest fee. 

Get inspired

  • Club de Reparadores in Argentina has helped organize more than 30 repair events in Buenos Aires, Río Negro and Córdoba, Argentina; and Montevideo, Uruguay.
  • The Bower Reuse and Repair Center in Australia has been in operation since 1998. Their mission is not only to reduce the amount of waste entering landfills by reclaiming household items for repair, reuse and resale, but also to provide affordable goods to low-income earners and to generate local employment.
  • The Restart Project in the UK focuses on electric devices. They run regular Restart Parties where people teach each other how to fix their broken and slow devices – "from tablets to toasters, from iPhones to headphones."

Start or join a repair café.

Creating a space for your community to come together and repair objects is not only a great way to keep waste out of the landfill and reduce consumerism, it can also create intergenerational bonding. At Repair Café events, people with specialized skills and knowledge come together to fix almost anything that's broken, from moth-eaten sweaters to smartphones. Originally started in Amsterdam, the concept has now spread around the world.

Take action

  • Find a repair café near you with Repair Café's links to Community groups in the US, Europe, and Australia. There are many other grassroots communities around the world, too. 
  • Start your own local group with Repair Cafe's Repair Café Manual and templates, offered for a modest fee. 

Get inspired

  • Club de Reparadores in Argentina has helped organize more than 30 repair events in Buenos Aires, Río Negro and Córdoba, Argentina; and Montevideo, Uruguay.
  • The Bower Reuse and Repair Center in Australia has been in operation since 1998. Their mission is not only to reduce the amount of waste entering landfills by reclaiming household items for repair, reuse and resale, but also to provide affordable goods to low-income earners and to generate local employment.
  • The Restart Project in the UK focuses on electric devices. They run regular Restart Parties where people teach each other how to fix their broken and slow devices – "from tablets to toasters, from iPhones to headphones."
Swap stuff with others in your community.
Expand Action
Swap stuff with others in your community.

Swapping the goods we already have is an excellent way of side-stepping consumerism and the compulsion to buy new products. Swapping enables us to let go of things we no longer need or want while enabling others to acquire them free of transactional obligations of money, trade or even barter. Get swapping with the resources below.

Take action

Get inspired

Swap stuff with others in your community.

Swapping the goods we already have is an excellent way of side-stepping consumerism and the compulsion to buy new products. Swapping enables us to let go of things we no longer need or want while enabling others to acquire them free of transactional obligations of money, trade or even barter. Get swapping with the resources below.

Take action

Get inspired

Policy action: Resist planned obsolescence.
Expand Action
Policy action: Resist planned obsolescence.

Planned obsolescence is the insidious practice of deliberately designing products to break, wear out, or stop functioning, compelling people to continually purchase replacements. Goods can also be made obsolete through technological "innovation" (such as when your computer operating system is no longer supported) or fashion (when those clothes you bought last year are suddenly "uncool"). Planned obsolescence is not only exacerbating the ecological crisis, it is also an environmental justice issue, since discarded products (full of toxic components in the case of electronics) too often end up being dumped in poor communities.  

Take action

  • Corporations make it difficult – or even illegal – for people to repair products they have purchased. Join the Right to Repair movement (US), which seeks to make it easier for people to legally repair their own goods.
  • The Repair Association (US) is leading campaigns for Right to Repair laws in several states.
  • Download a public policy guide to ending premature obsolescence in the European Union, written by the French organization Stop Planned Obsolescence (Halte à l'Obsolescence Programmée, or HOP). HOP's perspective is refreshingly broad: they critique what they call the "over-consumer society" founded on artificial desires stimulated by unscrupulous advertising and other commercial strategies. Sign their manifesto against planned obsolescence.

Get inspired

  • Thanks to a law passed in 2015, planned obsolescence – defined as deliberately reducing the life cycle of a product in order to increase its replacement rate – is illegal in France. It is punishable by a two-year prison sentence and a €300,000 fine.

Policy action: Resist planned obsolescence.

Planned obsolescence is the insidious practice of deliberately designing products to break, wear out, or stop functioning, compelling people to continually purchase replacements. Goods can also be made obsolete through technological "innovation" (such as when your computer operating system is no longer supported) or fashion (when those clothes you bought last year are suddenly "uncool"). Planned obsolescence is not only exacerbating the ecological crisis, it is also an environmental justice issue, since discarded products (full of toxic components in the case of electronics) too often end up being dumped in poor communities.  

Take action

  • Corporations make it difficult – or even illegal – for people to repair products they have purchased. Join the Right to Repair movement (US), which seeks to make it easier for people to legally repair their own goods.
  • The Repair Association (US) is leading campaigns for Right to Repair laws in several states.
  • Download a public policy guide to ending premature obsolescence in the European Union, written by the French organization Stop Planned Obsolescence (Halte à l'Obsolescence Programmée, or HOP). HOP's perspective is refreshingly broad: they critique what they call the "over-consumer society" founded on artificial desires stimulated by unscrupulous advertising and other commercial strategies. Sign their manifesto against planned obsolescence.

Get inspired

  • Thanks to a law passed in 2015, planned obsolescence – defined as deliberately reducing the life cycle of a product in order to increase its replacement rate – is illegal in France. It is punishable by a two-year prison sentence and a €300,000 fine.
Policy action: Advocate for Right to Repair laws.
Expand Action
Policy action: Advocate for Right to Repair laws.

Thanks to corporate power and government indifference, it is often difficult and sometimes illegal for people to repair their own equipment and devices, which compels an ever-accelerating treadmill of consumption and waste. We need laws and policies that mandate repairability and enshrine the right to repair.

Take action

  • Support Right to Repair efforts by US PIRG (US) and the European Right to Repair Campaign (EU), which seek to remedy the outrageous criminalization of repair by empowering people to legally repair goods they have purchased.
  • The Repair Association (US) is leading campaigns for Right to Repair laws in several states.

Get inspired

  • In 2020, France passed a law that will institute both a repairability and durability index for products, ban products that are impossible to repair, and encourage more durable and repairable products through procurement and taxation tools. Read more in the article Major steps for durability and Right to Repair taken in France from the European Right to Repair Campaign.
  • An anti-monopoly executive order by the Biden administration in the US bans companies from "establishing repair monopolies and from having policies that prevent DIY or independent repair," covering everything from consumer electronics to tractors. Read more in the article Biden’s Right to Repair Order Covers Electronics, Not Just Tractors from Vice.

Policy action: Advocate for Right to Repair laws.

Thanks to corporate power and government indifference, it is often difficult and sometimes illegal for people to repair their own equipment and devices, which compels an ever-accelerating treadmill of consumption and waste. We need laws and policies that mandate repairability and enshrine the right to repair.

Take action

  • Support Right to Repair efforts by US PIRG (US) and the European Right to Repair Campaign (EU), which seek to remedy the outrageous criminalization of repair by empowering people to legally repair goods they have purchased.
  • The Repair Association (US) is leading campaigns for Right to Repair laws in several states.

Get inspired

  • In 2020, France passed a law that will institute both a repairability and durability index for products, ban products that are impossible to repair, and encourage more durable and repairable products through procurement and taxation tools. Read more in the article Major steps for durability and Right to Repair taken in France from the European Right to Repair Campaign.
  • An anti-monopoly executive order by the Biden administration in the US bans companies from "establishing repair monopolies and from having policies that prevent DIY or independent repair," covering everything from consumer electronics to tractors. Read more in the article Biden’s Right to Repair Order Covers Electronics, Not Just Tractors from Vice.
Policy action: Rein in advertising.
Expand Action
Policy action: Rein in advertising.

Advertising - a global industry that spends nearly $600 billion each year - is one of the biggest drivers of consumerism, stoking artificial demand and warping preferences and perceptions towards discontentment and acquisitiveness with startling efficacy. Consumerism is wreaking environmental, social and psychological havoc, and we cannot confront it without taking on advertising. There are ways to fight back against this insidious industry, involving policy-based bans and restrictions, especially against advertising targeting children.

Take action

Get inspired

  • Both Norway and Sweden have passed laws to prohibit advertising that targets children.
  • The article The Growing Movement to End Outdoor Advertising, from Equal Times, shares about the city of Grenoble, France's recent ban on outdoor advertising, profiles networks of local chapters resisting advertising in France and the UK, and discusses the climate, environmental justice, and psychological impacts of landscapes plagued by advertisements.

Policy action: Rein in advertising.

Advertising - a global industry that spends nearly $600 billion each year - is one of the biggest drivers of consumerism, stoking artificial demand and warping preferences and perceptions towards discontentment and acquisitiveness with startling efficacy. Consumerism is wreaking environmental, social and psychological havoc, and we cannot confront it without taking on advertising. There are ways to fight back against this insidious industry, involving policy-based bans and restrictions, especially against advertising targeting children.

Take action

Get inspired

  • Both Norway and Sweden have passed laws to prohibit advertising that targets children.
  • The article The Growing Movement to End Outdoor Advertising, from Equal Times, shares about the city of Grenoble, France's recent ban on outdoor advertising, profiles networks of local chapters resisting advertising in France and the UK, and discusses the climate, environmental justice, and psychological impacts of landscapes plagued by advertisements.
Voices from the field

These short videos illuminate the community-building power of reducing consumption:

Resources