The 10th March Book Swap organised by CCF was a hit, attracting over 
50 book-lovers and encouraging them to exchange their old books for someone else’s. Many excellent new matches were made over the day and in total 802 books passed through the doors of the venue.
About 400 were donated to Amnesty books at the end of the day. Those books still go into the reused market, benefiting another charity and hopefully finding a new home where otherwise a brand-new book might have been bought instead. The other 400 were swapped directly; someone who brought a book to the event went home with someone else’s book, quite the neat exchange!
Penguin Publishers estimate on their website that a 500 page paperback incurrs a carbon footprint of 2.5kg. Another estimate states about 3kg for the average book. For 800 average books, with an estimated carbon footprint of 2.5kg each means just over 2 tons of carbon. That’s 1/6 the average footprint of a person in the UK for one year. So by sharing our books with each other rather than buying new books we’ve avoided those carbon emissions, as well as other environmental factors like any chemicals used in the printing process or the loss of habitat as the result of tree removal for paper resources.
What if we tried swapping and sharing not just with books and clothes, but with almost everything we use? That’s the focus of our upcoming event called The Sharing Economy: An Introduction to Collaborative Consumption. Book swapping is an example of one of the many forms of Collaborative Consumption, a concept wherein having access to a product (in this case a book) is more important to the individual than owning it. It will be an exciting evening, so book your place today!