Coca-cola helped popularize the modern image of Santa Clause... they didn't invent it but they used it to great effect to help sell their product and forever link Christmas and Coca-Cola.
Every year our office participates in something known as the Alternative Student Break (ASB). This activity gives students the opportunity to do a full semester of volunteer work in just one week. During the winter semester, we give a workshop about concepts related to waste and then we do a waste audit to see how the campus is doing.
This past month we experimented with a new topic... anti-consumption!
This idea came to us as we debated the topic of whether it was a bad thing that the Free Store was promoting the idea of consumption... which means consuming more resources. I won't spoil the entire workshop but I am going to give you a breakdown of what we did and what we discovered.
The Workshop
Our first day was spent going over the concepts of consumption, consumerism, and marketing. Essentially our goal was to explore what consumption meant and whether the participants thought it was a negative or positive thing. We followed this up with a brief history of marketing and how we differentiate needs and wants. This culminated in the concept of combating the desire to consume more things with consumption itself - fight fire with fire.
If consumption is an innate desire in all humans, why not use the Free Store to let people consume in a way that reduces social, economic, and environmental impacts.
The Activity
One of the things we like to do with our ASB activities is to give participants a chance to interact with a real life problem. In this case, we wanted to measure what the economic impact of the Free Store was for the community. We already knew how many materials were being collected by the Free Store, but we haven't measured the economic value of those materials in quite some time. This is helpful because it helps justify the cost of running the Free Store to the University.
So we had our participants collect materials from our donation bin and weigh each of them. Then, each item was researched to find out what the value of that item was today. Specifically, participants checked to see what the "second-hand" or "used" price was for each item. It could be argued that we could have used the "new" price of each item because that it what it would cost to purchase, but we didn't want to over-indulge in the savings to the community.
The Results
The participants then went about finding out what the value of several items were across eight categories, allowing them to create an average cost per weight for each.
This means that every kilogram of books was valued at $57.11. To ensure that the numbers in each category weren't being skewed, at least 30 items were weighed for each category, included some items that were broken or incomplete. This gave a much more realistic sense of the value of donated materials to the Free Store.
Once this was complete for one category, the participants could calculate the total value of all materials donated to the Free Store over the course of the year using the weight of the materials collected from previous years across the same eight categories.
$2,298.47 / 40.42 kg x 2,122.96 kg = $121,249.26
So in 2022-2023, the value of all the books collected was $121,249.26. Extending this methodology across all the categories means that the total value of donations collected was $2.3 M. Don't forget, this is using values for items that we found on Amazon and E-Bay, so it is a low end estimate. This was also calculated for the year 2021-22, yielding a total of $1.2 M which makes sense because the campus was still experiencing the tail end of the COVID pandemic.
The exercise also allowed us to take a good look at the materials being donated relative to their value. Clothing was the most represented category, 38% of all donations, while shoes were the category with the highest value per kilogram ($102.32 / kg).
The Take Home Message
The workshop only ran for four days instead of five. We had planned that the fifth day would include a consumption scavenger hunt of the nearby Rideau Centre mall, whereby participants would gather examples of pro-consumption messaging and share what they had learned during the week. This will have to be explored next year... because we definitely want to run the workshop again.
The participants were happy with the experience and the workshop helped the Free Store calculate its value to the community. Next year we might also experiment with determining the reduction to the environmental footprint of using the Free Store and ways to mobilize knowledge about low-impact consumerism. But for now one thing is certain, small programs like this can help move the needle on sustainability at uOttawa.
~jonathan rausseo - senior specialist, sustainability