Environmental destruction from excessive consumption and waste is leading to a shift in our relationship with products.

Jack Hunter explores whether sharing, repairing, reusing, and recycling will go truly mainstream after the Covid-19 pandemic.

War, revolution, and state failures can sweep away established social norms. Failing systems don’t survive a crisis. New, better-suited ways of doing things were probably there, to begin with, and quickly become the new normal. We once thought wearing masks in the street was weird. Now we don’t.

Looming behind today’s health crisis are serious system failures linked to the way we consume goods. Put simply, we buy and waste too much and the massive over-exploitation of our planet is going to get really ugly if we don’t change our ways. Happily, less harmful ways of using goods are fast becoming popular. How quickly the problems will push these solutions into the mainstream is hard to know, but we live in changing times.

Read the full article here.