Digitally Enabled Sharing and the Circular Economy: Towards a Framework for Sustainability Assessment

The prevailing patterns of consumption and production are not sustainable because they are based on increasing extraction of non-renewable resources (such as fossil fuels or scarce metals) from the Earth’s crust and overuse of life-sustaining ecosystem services (such as CO2 assimilation or the water cycle). One strategy to direct consumption to a sustainable pathway is the circular economy. The goal of the circular economy is to slow down the flow of material resources through the anthroposphere and to return them back to nature in a form that is as compatible as possible with the ecosystem processes. We focus on the first aspect, which means that each unit of material resource that enters the economic system should satisfy as much human needs as possible until it is considered waste. We ask the question if and how the emerging “sharing economy” can contribute to this specific goal. We see the phenomenon of sharing economy as a transformation of sharing practices with means of digital Information and Communication Technology (ICT). The resulting Digital Sharing Economy (DSE) can therefore be considered an important special case of ICT impact on sustainable development. We open up an argument on how sharing in the DSE can be either supportive or counter-productive with regard to the circular economy goals. We present a first framework that provides a guideline for the qualitative assessment of new sharing practices with regard to their potential contribution to a circular economy.