what struck me is the truly radical economic notion enmeshed in the Mesh: The more we share our stuff, the less we need to buy all that new stuff that inevitably leads to ever-rising greenhouse gas emissions, environmental degradation, and the pursuit of unsustainable consumption

Excerpted from a report by Todd Woody on a lecture by Lisa Gansky by :

“The Mesh is a fundamental shift in our relationship to the things in our lives,” said Gansky, who has written a book by the same name. “We’re moving to an economy where access to goods and services trumps ownership of them. The opportunity of the Mesh is to really design and support better things easily shared.”

“The recession has caused us to ask what the real value of things versus the cost,” she added. “This is a time where we’re more connected to more people than ever before.”

And so in recent years, we’ve seen the rise of a panoply of peer-to-peer services, beginning with music sharing in the Napster era to peer-to-peer money lending to car sharing.

The advent of smartphones and social networks like Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter and Yelp has accelerated the trend. But whether the Mesh is a plaything of the urban techno-hipsters or represents the advent of new economic model, as Gansky posits, remains to be seen.

But what struck me is the truly radical economic notion enmeshed in the Mesh: The more we share our stuff, the less we need to buy all that new stuff that inevitably leads to ever-rising greenhouse gas emissions, environmental degradation, and the pursuit of unsustainable consumption.

“If we look at ourselves as a global community, we have a lot of stuff,” Gansky said. “What we actually use of the stuff we have is a really small percentage.”

Gansky noted that people in the United States and Europe typically use their cars only 8 percent of the day. “For most people, the second most expensive thing we own is just sitting for most of the time,” she said.

So why not make cars share-ready when they roll off the assembly line?

“Not only in terms of their ability of to tap into a network but so when I buy a car and I automatically and easily have the option to make it available to somebody else to use and pay me or not,” Gansky said.

She noted that it took six years for Zipcar, which lets people rent vehicles by the hour in urban areas, to build a fleet of 1,000 cars. But it only took six months for WhipCar, a peer-to-peer car sharing service, to put 1,000 cars in service after its launch last year in the U.K. That’s because WhipCar lets people share their personal cars, much like the U.S. services Getaround, RelayRide and Spride Share.

Now think about embedding that ability to share in all sorts of objects.

Gansky acknowledged that getting people to change long-entrenched habits and cultural attitudes about ownership won’t be easy.

“We have experiences in our lives where sharing was irresistible but how do we do that on a regular basis and in a scalable way,” she said. “Generally, people change their habits when one thing happens — their pants are on fire.”

David Wigler provides extra details on the green potential, in three areas:

“Today, there are at least three peer-to-peer (P2P) models emerging that can facilitate greener transactions:

Rent. Today, there are many businesses that rent, instead of sell, products to consumers including Netflix, Zipcar and RentTheRunway to name a few. Shared products have a lower environmental footprint, of course, requiring fewer products overall to be produced to meet demand.

Recently, P2P models have emerged that allow consumers to rent products that they own including a spare bed (CouchSurfing), car (Spride, Getaround), even a wedding dress (Zilok). Such models leverage social networks to provide reviews and referrals for products and participants, as well as mobile apps that take advantage of location-based capabilities.

Exchange. Increasingly, consumers can facilitate the exchange of goods through trading, bartering or gifting. Such transactions reduce demand for new products by extending the lifecycle of existing ones. Such models provide a more flexible and open ended way to facilitate exchanges than with money. For example, FreeCycle users make products available free-of-charge to those that want to take them. In contrast, ThredUp facilitates the exchange of children’s clothes between peers but expects participants first to give clothes to a member in the community before accepting clothing in return. Similarly, Swap enables members to exchange books, CDs, movies and video games. What you can get depends on whether others want what you have to give.

Use Virtual Currency. Consumers can facilitate transactions through the use of virtual currencies that provide many of the benefits of a legal tender – the ability to accumulate, bank and borrow – without actually having to be legal tender. Such currencies work well in networked communities that rely on shared services to deliver a product or service. The Superfluid, for example, is a collaborative social network in which members conduct peer-to-peer transactions by exchanging “favors” for virtual currency. Here, a marketplace has been established whereby individuals offer their services (say, web development) in exchange for Quids and then, in turn, spend Quids on services that they need (copy writing).”