I was delighted to discover today the TreeHugger blog for green hipsters:
TreeHugger
is the definitive, modern yet green lifestyle filter. It will help you
improve your course, yet still maintain your aesthetic.
Among the concepts they push is the “Product Service Systems,” that is, the transformation of a product into a service. Zipcar
is the quintissential PSS, turning consumers from car-purchasers into
car-micro-renters. It’s a business model that makes eminent sense
(consider the software industry from Open Source workshops to Microsoft
itself), though how “green” it is depends on the product/service itself.
For
example, Zipcar enables more consumers to purchase fewer cars, which
arguably reduces the demand for car manufacture. According to Zipcar,
customers end up driving less than they would have if they owned their
own cars — probably because the incentive system changes from trying
to maximize returns from a fixed investment (a purchased car) to
miminizing a variable cost (car rental). The most important side effect
of this incentive change is that consumers begin internalizing the
external costs of driving, e.g. they see driving as exacting a cost
each time they drive, not just when they go to the gas station. (Do
people really cut down on driving when gas prices go up? Perhaps not as
much as we’d like when you consider that the full costs of gasoline usage
is not priced into the pump). Rather than impose those externalities on
consumers via unpopular taxes, Zipcar does it through the extraction of
profits — a win for environmentalists, a win for the company, and for
us at least, a win for the consumer.
I don’t know that all PSS’s are environmentally superior to
their purchase alternatives. Some of the factors one might have to
weigh would be balancing the environmental costs of manufacture and
delivery to those of the rental transaction and service delivery. For
example, does Ebay have a net
positive effect on the environment (through the recycling of products
that obviates the need for new manufacture) or a net negative effect
(through billions of micro-transactions that necessitate door-to-door
deliveries on trucks)? A positive side effectfor those of us concerned
about economic fairness of shifting from product- to service-delivery
is that most service delivery is more labor-intensive than product
manufacture, which means that profits are necessarily distributed more
widely across low- and medium-skill workers rather than concentrated
among high-skill workers and productivity-boosters like robots.
