Issues in assessing the environmental impact of sharing: Examples of umbrellas, baby products, and electric scooters

Abstract

New business models such as sharing and subscriptions are highly anticipated as efforts toward carbon neutrality, but there has been much debate regarding their actual effectiveness. This article introduced several sharing case studies examined by author’s research group—namely, umbrellas, baby products, and electric scooters—highlighting the considerations and discussions that arose during the evaluation of these examples. In LCA, the functional unit is one of the key concepts, but in the evaluation of sharing models, it is often the case that setting such a functional unit is not suitable, and sufficient discussion has yet to take place on what frameworks for comparison exist in such cases. It is probably necessary to evaluate changes in the entire system, including rebound effects, but it is also true that such assessments are not simple. With that in mind, we hope that, based on various case studies, discussions will progress toward more appropriate evaluation methods. Keywords: sharing, subscription, functional unit, rebound effect, system change