[00:00:08] Barry O'Kane: Hello and welcome back to HappyPorch Radio, the Circular Economy Technology Podcast, where together with leading experts, thinkers, and doers, we explore the intersection of technology and the circular economy. 

I'm Barry, the founder of HappyPorch. We provide software engineering expertise for a more circular economy.

[00:00:26] Jo Weston: And I'm Jo. I help purpose driven and circular businesses turn their vision into a strategy and story that moves people to act.

[00:00:36] Barry O'Kane: In this episode, we continue our exploration of all things rental with a discussion on how rental is viewed within the academic world and the circular economy.

Our expert guide for this conversation is Lucy Wishart, who is a lecturer in circular economy and sustainable transformations at Edinburgh University.

Jo, what stood out for you in this conversation?

[00:00:56] Jo Weston: Yeah, it was great hearing what Lucy's views were on rental, and I thought it was particularly interesting to think about how rental could be more successful. Particularly when thinking about how rental works within a community setting that places can become rental hubs like libraries and universities. If we enhance that with technology, that can encourage a whole new generation of people to start renting in the future.

[00:01:25] Barry O'Kane: Yeah, I enjoyed this whole conversation with Lucy and we did a meander around lots of big topics, but one thing that stood out for me was the need to balance or to step between the big picture vision of a circular economy and the ideal future that we would like to reach, and the reality of the current day-to-day. So partial solutions, solving difficult problems. I think that's especially true from a technology point of view, being able to live in the moment and solve current problems, but have an idea or an understanding of the vision of the potential for what circular economies, plural, could look like for the future. 

So let's meet Lucy. 

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[00:02:02] Lucy Wishart : My name is Lucy Wishart. I am a lecturer in the Circular Economy and Sustainable Transformations in the School of Geoscience at the University of Edinburgh. I research circular economy governance,  organisational community and national levels, particularly within Scotland. And I'm really interested in the ways in which we know about the circular economy and the data that we use in that knowledge informs how we then govern the circular economy. 

I also lead the circular economy program at the moment in the Edinburgh Futures Institute.

[00:02:34] Barry O'Kane: Wonderful. Thank you and welcome to HappyPorch Radio. Thanks for joining us. 

[00:02:36] Lucy Wishart: Thanks for having me.

[00:02:37] Barry O'Kane: So one of the reasons I'm excited about this conversation is I know very little about the academic view or academic work that's happening in circular economy, and I know that's growing and there's more and more stuff, so I'm quite looking forward to this conversation.

But just to set us off, why don't you share a little bit about yourself and what led you to this job and your passion for circularity?

[00:02:59 ]Lucy Wishart: Yeah, absolutely. 16 years ago, I went to do a master's in Sweden on Sustainability Science, the data and the knowledge behind sustainability. And there I became really interested in how they managed waste because it seemed so different to how things were managed in Scotland.

That, I guess, started my interest academically in thinking about how waste is managed and how we were able to see that and know about it because actually I didn't have any idea how waste was managed in Scotland. So I came back and I did a PhD at the University of St. Andrews in management, looking at the, what was then the Scottish Waste Policy, which was the Zero Waste policy that has now grown into the Scottish Circular Economy Policy. And I worked at St. Andrew's teaching Sustainable Management for 10 years. 

And then earlier, this academic year I joined Edinburgh in a new position as a lecturer in the circular economy and sustainable transformation, so I can focus on that full time. I've always taught circular business models as part of my teaching at St. Andrews, but I really wanted the opportunity to be able to focus my research and teaching on the circular transformation pretty much in everything that I do.

[00:04:15] Jo Weston: And what are you working on at the moment?

[00:04:18] Lucy Wishart : So at the moment I'm really looking at how we can think about data on a systemic level for systems of reuse. I've just almost finished a project looking at the work of reuse and the practices of reuse that occur in Scottish charity shops. And so much of that is hidden and unseen and unaccounted for when we're talking about the circular economy.

So we're now starting to think about how can we account for it? What data can we collect to show the value that is added by these different services that go much beyond the economic value, the social value, the environmental value, the collective values and thinking about how, what would that look like on a system?

How can we start to show that to other people? A wee bit, like the original idea of understanding how the waste system works and visualising that differently, but now thinking about systems of reuse.

[00:05:12] Barry O'Kane: Brilliant. Thank you. Quite excited. As you know, in this season we've been exploring rental and in the first couple of episodes we've discussed a lot about terminology and rental in different spaces, subscription we've talked about as-a-service, and we'll be exploring those a little bit more.

But what I'm interested in is if you can maybe help us build on that a little bit and talk a little bit about how rental fits into some of the circular economy frameworks?

[00:05:39] Lucy Wishart : Yeah of course. I think it's quite difficult to think about how the circular economy is imagined within academia because there's so many different spaces that it's operating in, and that word “imagined” I think is really important. So there's probably a space that sees the circular economy as more of a, like an imaginary future.

So trying to imagine how the world would be different. And that would be probably where I'd place myself more. So that thinking about that donut economy idea of how can we maximise social value, but minimise environmental harm through our resource use. So the economy is a vehicle for that, if you like.

Then on the other hand, we have a part of academia looking at the circular economy, which is really trying to make sense of it and create structures and frameworks through which we can make sense of this really complex and messy transformation. And I see rental as fitting in both those spaces quite comfortably but in different ways.

So in the imaginary sense, of course, rental fits quite nicely in that imaginary of having created social value with your environmental impacts. Rental requires probably that we have higher quality products because they're gonna be used by multiple people. It requires us to rethink some ideas of ownership that are perhaps problematic.

It maybe challenges us to think about what's happening with the end of life of a product because you've got responsibility for it. It extends that idea of stewardship, if you like, of a product and it changes who has that responsibility? Also embedded in rental is a kind of idea potentially of repair because you don't wanna lose the value of the product. So it fits quite nicely with the imaginary. 

When we move to the framework side of things it's there, it's present. People talk about product system services, but where it fits within those frameworks is quite tricky. Is it refusing? Is it reusing? I don't know where you think it fits in? Is it actually repairing? Because it does fit with repair, right? Because repair is part of rental. It's just the repair is not being done by the individual consumer. It's being done by the business that's doing the rental. So it's present but not easily categorised, if that makes sense.

[00:07:56] Jo Weston: And it seems very bespoke. So it seems to very much depend on the individual business model. So if you think about renting clothes, for example, that's often not reused in the sense of it's a one-time rental and then there's the difficulty around how to re-rent that item. I think depending on what the business model is, depends where it fits.

[00:08:19] Lucy Wishart : Yes, absolutely. And I think that also raises some, maybe some of the critiques of rental, which are a wee bit unfounded, that we don't actually know what the environmental footprint of it is because it's so difficult. Determined by place, determined by product, determined by user, determined by market.

And I guess there is a body of academic work that's trying to think about how do we calculate the impacts of something like rental. I don't know if you remember, I lived in Sweden, it may have been seven or eight years ago, there was a Guardian piece, I think the headline was that renting clothing is worse than just throwing them away. And some have done a lifecycle assessment of rental and what they’ve found was that because of the transport systems and because of the delivery and transport requirements and washing of the rental clothing and the lifecycle assessment, as they'd set it up, looking at the impacts of the garment across its entire lifecycle was higher than if someone had bought it, had just disposed of it because of the additional transport, carbon emissions. And I guess that draws attention to the fact that's the system. It's not the individual practice or process. And I still think there's a bit of a gap in the academic work thinking about the systems needed to support rental. Moving beyond, maybe, that individual business model approach.

[00:09:45] Jo Weston: It also feels like it's very much connected, not in the sense of clothing, but in other rental models to repair. Like the two are very much intertwined. So I think that's an interesting one from a longevity point of view. From renting a bike that keeps going for longer or renting a washing machine. 

[00:10:06] Lucy Wishart : And also reuse Jo. I think because so many rental firms have a reuse part of their business for when the product is no longer being able to be rented, then there has to be a secondary market for it to be sold, where you can buy perhaps the product at a lower cost because it's not of a high enough quality to be rented, but actually owning it is, people would be happy to own a product that look like potentially what it looks like, or I guess for fashion it might be that it's not particularly fashion for one group of people. So from a rental perspective, it makes no sense, whereas actually an individual might not care about particular trends where they might be willing to buy it on a secondhand market. So the intersections across these frameworks, I think rental shows really nicely.

[00:10:52] Barry O'Kane: Yeah. And there's an interesting thread there, which Ryan from Supercycle, who we have an episode with coming up later in the season, has a story, the way he views things is that the relationship with resale and rental is even closer than that.

And they often think something is resold multiple times. So in effect, that's rental. I'm paying a period of some money to own it for a while, and then I'm getting some of that money back. So I've had a cost for that short-term rental, which I think is really interesting and all of that. I wanted to quickly go back just to something else you said as well and the sort of two different approaches  within academia. 

You said imagining the future and what that could be and how that might look like. And then some of the research around this, what you described as the other side of the doing. That's something that I really resonate with thinking about some of the day-to-day work that we do about, okay, we're working with a circular business and we're trying to build a tool to help optimise an operational system or something. Very often there's a “How do I tie this to that bigger vision of where it eventually could be circular?”

And I think I've come to the conclusion, and this is one thing I'm interested in your thoughts on, or if there's research into, I've come to the conclusion that it is a messy line to get to that imagine transition, wonderful potential future, and that it's okay for that not to be a straight line.

Somebody else, from Circulab in France, has a really great quote on a past season of this podcast, where he said something to the effect that circularity does not automatically mean sustainable, this wonderful future, but it's an important prerequisite so that if we need to try and implement circular processes in the hope that leads to, even if it doesn't directly equal, but maybe it leads to and opens the door for some of these bigger systemic changes. Does that make sense?

[00:12:26] Lucy Wishart: I guess the first thing is the distinction, and it's something that I'm working through in my head and I'm not sure I've picked up from academic literature or just from interacting in different spaces. So my work is interdisciplinary. I teach the interdisciplinary program. I'm often working with colleagues who have a much more disciplinary background looking at circularity. 

So that means it might be chemists or engineers or I'm in the school of geosciences with geographers. And there's a distinction for me between circularity and the circular economy. So circularity is a thing that can be quite small scale and localised and circular. And that can operate and be within a linear economy. And then there's the circular economy or circular economies, because I don't think there's probably one circular economy. There's probably multiple circular economies that work together. 

That's broader and requires more than one product. Requires more than one organisation, requires a much bigger systems change, and it's really hard to create a circular economy as an individual idea, it's collective. It requires us to work together. And so sometimes I think maybe, and I see it in conversations that I have with people as well, they feel like this thing isn't leading to the circular economy, and of course, this individual element is not leading to the circular economy. That's far too big an ambition for one. You wouldn't expect any product or organisation or system to be, or even collective to be able to reorganise an entire economy but yet the vision is very much a systems level.

And the vision that people have and the passion that people have is at that systems level. 'cause it's at the systems level where we start to see the broader social benefits and the social value, and it's at the systems level where we can start to really evaluate the environmental harms and reducing the environmental harms.

So I can see that disconnect. I also wanted to pick up a little bit on the messiness aspect. So I positioned myself and for a long time when I was a PhD student, there wasn't really that many people working on waste or the circular economy. The circular economy wasn't really even a phrase people used when I was a PhD student, but people weren't really working on waste.

I came across this blog that was based out of North America called Discard Studies, where it was a collective of academics, sometimes loosely calling themselves academics, sometimes practitioners, sometimes artists who were talking about how something becomes waste. How do we discard things? And discard studies has become a wee bit more solidified, over the last 10, 15 years.

And one of the things it says is that any system creates waste. So as soon as you create a system, there's going to be waste from that system, and that includes when you're trying to create circular systems, there's always gonna be waste from that. But that doesn't mean that we can’t be intentional about that waste.

And the problem with the linear economy is not necessarily that it creates waste because any kinda structure or organising is gonna create waste. But we don't account for it. We don't have any thoughts about it. We're not trying to do it differently. We're not being intentional and thinking about that bigger imaginary or vision as we're doing the process. 

So I think that messiness is always gonna be a part of a circular economy. Even as if we become more circular on the systems level, we're still gonna be grappling with this particular activity, or this particular thing that we're doing is having outside impacts. And as long as we're intentional about that, then that's okay.

[00:15:57] Jo Weston: And it's a really long term that needs to start small and then build it up. A waste, in fact, they weren't a waste company. They were a technology company here in Amsterdam. And we always used to say waste is only waste if you waste it. And I think one of the biggest challenges is awareness around waste and what is waste, and if you start to shift your mindset over waste being actually a valuable raw material, then I think we would all think quite differently about when we open the bin at home to put something in. So I think it's just people have become very detached and desensitized from the whole concept of waste. Imagine if you could get that kind of change of behavior going around people feeling guilty, putting something in the rubbish bin and yeah, that it's not rubbish at all. So I'm interested to know from you, like how do you see those challenges and what have you researched in terms of that core awareness change which is needed to make that transition, to make all of these transitions in this ecosystem that people start to view waste in a different way?

[00:17:11]Lucy Wishart: I don't know if it's that people necessarily start to see waste in a different way. But rather they see their practices and what they're aiming to do in a different way. And thinking about the best way to achieve whatever they're trying to achieve. And I don't think that people do that individually, and I don't think that's necessarily about awareness.

If I can go back to the charity shop project that I mentioned earlier, we've just published a paper not that long ago that looks at consumers in charity shops and what encouraged them to shop in the charity shops. And what encouraged them was not information about the environmental harm or knowledge. It was about the experience of going shopping with other people, enjoying being in the store. You know, there was a real collective identity created about what it means to be part of this community of reusers or seeing something really pleasant about the experience and I was actually really surprised about how many people go charity shopping as a tourist activity.

So lots of people were on their holidays and they were like, I love a little walk around the charity shops with my husband or my sister, or whatever. And that's like a completely different framing of how we think about some of the behavior changes that we need to see as to encourage more circular circularity.

[00:18:34] Jo Weston: Yeah, I see it like a different experience as opposed to a better experience or changing the way that you do things, which is always a hard one to crack with changing people's behaviors, but it's a totally different experience for people, I think.

[00:18:50] Lucy Wishart: I guess one of the things that's really interesting about rental for me, when we think about behaviors and changing behaviors and how people operate is one of the terms from academia that's really resonated with me recently is an idea called consumption work. And that is the work that we do or that happens in order to allow us to consume.

So if you imagine that you buy your furniture from IKEA versus buying your furniture from a traditional furniture store, then you have to do some consumption work at home to create your chair to sit on for the recycling system to work. Once we finish our yogurt pot or whatever, we've gotta give it a clean out and put it in the right bin.

So again, that's work that allows that system of consumption to operate. And quite a lot of the time when we're thinking about circular systems, that increases the consumption work for individuals. So it takes more time to shop secondhand, it takes more time to sort things for recycling, it takes more time to repair things.

And so it's  moving that work or that value that's being added to the economy into the home where it's not being accounted for, where we're not able to see who's doing that work, who's actually moving the circular economy forward. One of the things about rental is quite a lot of that consumption work is taken out and put within a business or an organisation. So the cleaning, the repair, the sorting, the providing it at the right time. I think there's quite a lot of consumption work involved in storage and moving your stuff around. 

There's a concept a colleague of mine wrote about, Katherine Ellsworth-Krebs, she wrote about this from her PhD, which was called, I think she called it Peak Household.

So the idea that we design our households based on our absolute peak. So you know you want a spare room because your grand might come and visit twice a year, or you want an extra shower because you're worried about when the kids are grown up, that they'll be teenagers for two or three years where everybody's battling for the chair and I think there's a lot of consumption work that comes around from that sort of peak household idea. 

So I think about the amount of time that we spend looking through stuff in our loft when actually if we just rented it, we wouldn't have to do that. I could shift that to somebody else. That's where I think rental is really interesting, that movement of that work that is involved in trying to find stuff. I feel like I've told this story quite a lot, but I once tried to order a gorilla suit from Vinted and the person contacted me and they were like, I'm really sorry, but I'm really embarrassed I can't find the gorilla suit. We probably can understand that, right?

There's things that are hidden and we don't see, and rental offers an opportunity. For not having that, those difficulties and that extra time and that stress of finding stuff.

If you're in a transient community, we know that waste is higher in transient communities because you're often leaving quite quickly. So universities, for example you've not got very long at the end of the term, you need to get out.  It's so much easier to take your stuff back to somewhere than it is to try and find a new home for it.

That is also consumption work that you can pass on to somebody else, but maybe an organisation can be set up to provide that service for you. 

[00:21:59] Jo Weston: That’s a great idea actually. Universities having a kind of, when you arrive, you go to the rental place and you pick up your kitchen kit and your bedding and whatever you need, and then you just return it at the end.

[00:22:13] Lucy Wishart : I think we are trialing it at some universities, that kind of model, but, it's quite a different mindset for universities, I think, to think of themself as a sauce pan rental element of their business or that's quite far away from the core business. But absolutely a good solution and opportunity for thinking about enhancing circularity that is not students buying really cheap sauce pans and getting rid of them at the end of three or four years.

[00:22:41] Barry O'Kane:. I haven't heard that term before, so that's really fascinating but it does articulate one of the things that I think often rental businesses look at, this is the service I'm providing and taking away some of that consumption work, which is a brilliant way of encapsulating it. And it also feeds into the sort of as-a-service and maybe you can talk a little bit about the product service system concept, because that's providing more than the product as part of the rental and extra value there.

[00:23:07] Lucy Wishart: Yeah, of course. So I think there's a really nice example of where rental or a lot of these concepts are much, much older than the idea or the vision of the circular economy. So product system services I think has been around for 30 years or so, maybe 25 years, but a long time. So I learned about it first when I was doing that Master's in Sweden.

So it's not something that's new and it's not necessarily something that it predates the circular economy, if you like. And what I think is really interesting about that concept is how it's been stretched. So it allows us to see things in different ways. So rental is part of it.

Renting the products, you're renting the service, but there you can go to one other end of it, which is buying a service that's associated with a product. It might be a repair service or it might be a kind of How do you use the product service and then the complete other end of it.

It really encourages us to think about things that we wouldn't think of as maybe rental or as a service, like public transport. I'm not buying a bus. To get me from here into town, but I'm quite happy to use a bus. Why is it that I'm quite happy to use, and being able to think expands how we think about ownership versus use in a really nice way.

But it's also really difficult then to fit that concept of product system services, which people see as being important in the circular economy into the frameworks of how the circular economy has been envisaged and it comes back that nine R element. And there's been a lot of work done, I think, on the difficulties and challenges that come from product system services and perhaps not so much done about the bigger systems changes.

[00:24:51] Barry O'Kane: That's interesting. It's also interesting you're saying how do those two get merged at almost a conflict? Because if we're thinking about circularity, one of the ways that I've definitely, in my imagination space that you mentioned earlier of like “How does this happen? Is that moving?” Changing the ownership conversation. And as a business, one of the obvious business models and the practical ways of doing that are looking at things like rental or servitisation and the as-a-service concept, subscription, et cetera. Exactly what we just talked about. So for me that feels like a natural fit.

So can you tell a bit more about why that maybe doesn't fit or is harder to fit into the nine Rs or whatever the models that we have for circularity?

[00:25:26] Lucy Wishart : I don't know if it's that it doesn't fit, it's that it doesn't fit neatly. It cross cuts, if that makes sense. I wonder if it's because the nine Rs are still thinking about circularity as circularity and not circularity as circular economy.

And rental maybe fits in with that kind of fuzzier feeling more because of course rental can be circular, but it also could maybe sometimes not be circular.

And I guess understanding the reasons behind rental and why people might rent. I'm not sure, I can't even remember what the company was, but I remember a few years ago, (inaudiable) where you would rent furniture, for example, to update your furniture quite frequently with the Instagram effect. 

And that's not really in the spirit, I think of the circular imaginary. Then I think there's also a social element with rental that perhaps could not fit within that circular imaginary, which is about the maximising social value. Because rental brings up issues  around ownership, of course, and who owns things.

And that's where we see the other kind of, if there's lots of circles about different terms in academia, one of the other circles that crosses over quite a lot with the circular economy where you might find rental in the sort of Venn diagram space is the sharing economy. So the critiques of the sharing economy obviously come up to who owns the ultimate product. Who owns the right to make the money out of it? Is it shared equally? Does everyone have equal access? Does it create different hierarchies of ability to use things or access things? 

[00:27:08] Barry O'Kane:  That's fascinating. One other thing you touched there- we had an episode that we released earlier in this season with Leah when we were talking about leasing, particularly in smartphones and how actually the driver for that was actually to accelerate the movement to new devices, not to be more genuinely circular.

But I'm just aware of time, so I thought it’d be interesting to change gears slightly. And talk a little bit more if you have examples of rental in the real world. So any sort of, like, rental that's happening or subscription or leasing that that fits some of that “Okay here's something that's innovative or pushing towards the future.”

[00:27:43] Lucy Wishart: One of the things is that I am not necessarily looking at individual businesses or unless I'm using them as a consumer. So I feel a little bit like, it's me suggesting them. So I wondered about maybe turning it on its head and I'm not, I don't really have great examples of this, but we look at great businesses that are working well in rental, but I'm actually wondering if there are great places where rental works really well and looking at communities where rental has become a thing. And I think then you're starting to see maybe some spaces that are places that have existed for a long time.

There are loads and loads of rental places in and around Aviemore, for example, in Scotland because you've got rentals of bikes, they do camping equipment and they change what they do throughout the year and they're dynamic and they've been going on for eons.

And I think those are really nice rental places and hotspots because I think there are places and circumstances where rental is going to be more successful than others. And that's where again, I think maybe some of the technology and data comes in to allow us to see that on a systems level rather than facilitating individual rentals which I think there's also great examples of that. 

When we started camping as a family, when my kids got old enough, we used the camp rental scheme. I think it's almost entirely digital, it was great for us initially. And actually what was really interesting from it, this is a wee bit more anecdotal than science.

We used it to test what tent we would need so that we could go out and buy the tent on a secondhand market, because you can't test things secondhand.

So renting then led to being able to get a secondhand tent in a way that if we'd had to go straight to secondhand, we wouldn't have had the opportunity to know what it looked like or how big it was or any of those elements.

But I think they're very driven by technology and although there's a place obviously for tech there, I actually would like to see maybe some more digitalisation of understanding those rental places.

[00:29:43] Barry O'Kane: That's really interesting. And there's a bit of a theme there in what you were saying at the start as well about data or the sort of visibility of some of these things not existing. And it not being straightforward to measure, it's not a case of just quickly go out and find, it's one of the challenges is identifying what it is and then working out how to gather and understand, measure it.

[00:30:02] Jo Weston:  Community rental schemes now I think are very much still reliant on the old school of having to go somewhere within a particular timeframe to pick something up.

If you think about tool shares and those kind of initiatives are great, but they're not digitalised at all.

So if I think that, if you could bundle that all together for a particular community that would also create the community atmosphere around the concept of rental as well as yeah, making it more easy to rent.

[00:30:36] Lucy Wishart: And I think there's some great opportunities there to feed into some social value things and conversations that are happening. So we're talking about closing libraries all across the UK and libraries are the spaces and the places where people they're centrally located to rent. That is renting, isn't it?

Or accessing model, if you like. How can they be those places which are already well positioned, be used in other ways to support rental, maybe not in partnership with other organisations as well. So how can those spaces coexist.

[00:31:10] Jo Weston: That would make a lot of sense, actually to use that location and bundle everything in one place and then provide some digitalisation around it so that people can access those services and those things more easily.

[00:31:23] Lucy Wishart: And know they exist as well.  I think one of the things ,  I think when I find out about rental services, it's been pretty word of mouthy. Somebody's told me that they've done it.

[00:31:34] Jo Weston: You pick up a leaflet in a cafe about something, you're like, Oh, I didn't know about that.

From a marketing perspective, there’s also some work to be done.

[00:31:43] Lucy Wishart : Yeah, that visibility and knowing where they are, absolutely.

[00:31:48] Jo Weston: And you mentioned at the start about Sweden. Are there, what was it that was happening in Sweden that really spoke to you? And what are they doing there in terms of rental? 

[00:32:00] Lucy Wishart : I don't wanna say what they're doing now, but one thing that I can - So I was in Lund, which is a big bike city and initially I bought a bike and it probably wasn't very much money, it was probably 30 quid and it kept breaking down and it was a total pain. And also the two years I was in Sweden, the south of Sweden doesn't get a lot of snow, but it was like the most snow in 60 years.

You don't want your bike breaking down when there's a blizzard going on and you're just trying to get home. So then about halfway through my first year, I went to a proper bike rental shop and they gave me a long lease. For a year and a half. And I rented that bike for a year and a half.

And whenever it needed fixing, I just took it to them and they would charge me a very nominal fee to fix it or change anything. And then I took it back to them at the end. And if it was of a certain quality, I got a certain amount of money back from it. And that just was a really well functioning system.

And it's what you're seeing in, when we were chatting at the beginning, Jo, about. Sometimes rental does make sense, particularly for people like students who, it might seem more expensive as an outlay, but actually, if you're able to think about it over a certain period of time, then actually it is the right thing to do.

[00:33:15] Barry O'Kane: And solving a problem beyond the product as well. Like you said, you had the bicycle, but then you had the problem of fixing it and looking after it and so there's that extra service aspect. 

Thank you so much. I'm really aware of time and I knew this was gonna be a big, wide ranging conversation, so thanks for exploring and wandering around.That was really fun. And obviously we barely scratched the surface on some of that stuff, but I really enjoyed that. 

Thank you. And there's some really fascinating things in there that I need to go in, learn and research a little bit more. I think that can add real value to our work with rental businesses as well. So thank you.

[00:33:44] Lucy Wishart: Thank you very much for having me. Thank you both.

[00:33:45] Jo Weston: Yes. Thank you.

[00:33:49] Outro: This podcast is brought to you by happyporch.com. Whether you need bespoke software development, fractional CTO support, or just expert advice, HappyPorch is here to support your circular economy initiatives. If you're driving innovation and circularity, we'd love to chat. 

Your hosts were Barry O’Kane and Jo Weston. 

Barry is a software engineer, leader, and entrepreneur with over 20 years experience. He founded HappyPorch to help you create web and software solutions that support the shift to regenerative circular economy. 

 Jo helps purpose driven and circular businesses turn their vision into a brand and story that moves people to act. She works with teams at tipping points ready to scale or reposition for greater impact.