Loanablog

Loanablog has moved - update your RSS

Ryan — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 20:24:00 -0400

We have moved Loanablog onto the Blogger platform at http://blog.loanables.com. Please visit the new site and subscribe to the feed, and check out our latest post describing how your stuff can be the best investment in your portfolio!

Austin EcoSchool now enrolling

Ryan — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 11:17:00 -0400

We are long overdue for an update. Lots of exciting things happening at Loanables, including our coverage on KXAN and CNN (more on this later). I wanted to take a moment to pass along an announcement from Austin EcoSchool -- see below.

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What would a school look like if it were comprised of an old stone house, reclaimed furniture and school supplies, and trash for art supplies? Come to EcoSchool to find out. For two years we've been growing organic veggies, composting our lunch scraps, caring for the creek, and cleaning our building with vinegar. Our kids show up in used clothing, so they can play, create, and get downright dirty without worry. They've come up with hundreds of uses for the bamboo that grows in the yard, and they've given every oak a pet name. We pack our lunches as sustainably as possible, with real linens and dishes, not disposable stuff. This year our kids reached out to help men, women, children, and animals without homes. You need to meet this dynamic group of children;
they're expressive, compassionate, hardworking. Their hearts hold hope and their minds seek wisdom.

Austin EcoSchool is holding Summer Informational Orientation Nights:

Tuesday, July 1st, 6pm
Sunday, July 13th, 6pm
Thursday, July 31st, 6pm

The beautiful EcoSchool campus is located at 3000 Del Curto, Austin
TX 78704

Please join us to meet the community and discover if our school is right for your child. Austin EcoSchool is a 3-4 day/week school providing a bridge between homeschooling and full-time private education. Academic instruction is woven into a thematic and creative curriculum designed to make learning natural, relevant, and lasting. EcoSchool is a fun and loving place where every child is accepted and respected in their journey of self-discovery.

austinecoschool.org

(512) 447-8516

Please direct inquiries to kshoberg@gmail.com.

Now enrolling children ages 5 – 11 for Fall 2008!

The Story of Stuff -- a must-see!

Ryan — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 22:41:00 -0500

If you haven't seen it yet, you have to check out The Story of Stuff. It's about 20 minutes long, but fun to watch and very well done. This should be mandatory viewing for all students. It shows just how harmful our over-consuming habits are to the environment and the global community.

Eliminate unwanted catalogs with Catalog Choice!

Ryan — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 21:28:00 -0500

Every now and then you run across an idea that is so brilliant, you hope the inventors win a Nobel prize. These are usually things that are:
1) very simple
2) very useful

While we hope that Loanables matches these criteria, I am actually writing about Catalog Choice, a service that I discovered a couple of months ago. This free service allows you to register catalogs that you no longer wish to receive. Catalog Choice will contact the merchants and inform them of your desire to not receive their catalogs. The site reports that in 2005, over 19 billion catalogs were sent out to U.S. consumers! Think about the enormous resources involved in creating, printing, and distributing those catalogs!

Personally, I don't need catalogs anymore -- I use the internet for all at-home shopping. And yet dozens of companies insist on shoving their catalogs into my face each week. I used to call them up and unsubscribe, but somehow I get back on their lists (without even buying anything or opting in.) While Catalog Choice hasn't eliminated all of my mailings, I've definitely noticed some reduction. And they make it easy to report companies who continue to send catalogs even after you have unsubscribed.

In addition to the environmental impact, I have another reason for not wanting all of those catalogs. We have one of those community mailbox stations, where our box is only about 6" by 6" large. It only takes a few catalogs to fill that up, and then your important mail has to be stored at the post office for pickup. What a pain!

You can see a list of all merchants who have begun taking data feeds from Catalog Choice here: http://www.catalogchoice.org/pages/merchants. I certainly hope others will follow their lead and end the wastefulness of unwanted catalogs. Go check out Catalog Choice and see how easy it is to use. And tell your friends!

Top 10 ways to live a more sustainable life

Ryan — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 21:57:00 -0500

Ok everyone, it's time for New Year's resolutions! Here is a suggestion -- try to live a more sustainable life by reducing the amount of CO2 produced by your lifestyle. Not sure how to do it? Well, the great folks over at YouSustain can help you out! Start by reading their great article on the Top 10 Easiest Ways To Become More Sustainable For 2008. Then, check out their Sustainability Challenges (there's even one for Borrowing durable goods instead of Buying.)

The thing I love about this site is that it goes beyond just offering suggestions by helping you measure the impact of a more sustainable live -- both environmentally and economically. It is great to see both the CO2 reduction and the monetary savings that result from even the smallest changes in our daily lifestyle. I'm participating in a couple of challenges, and plan to incorporate more of them over time. What will you do to live a more sustainable life in 2008?

Fair Indigo - a fair trade company who is changing the world

Ryan — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 21:53:00 -0500

At a conference a couple of weeks ago, I had the distinct pleasure of hearing Bill Bass, the CEO of Fair Indigo, speak about his fair trade clothing company. (I even got to meet him afterward.) Fair Trade is social movement that is still in its infancy, but beginning to gain popularity. The essence of fair trade is to pay a fair price to the people who make goods, and to respect the environmental and social situations in their communities.

Bill spoke about how difficult it is to find clothing suppliers who will participate. Tongue in cheek, he explained about calling up factories in 3rd-world countries and saying "hello, we would like to pay you more for your clothes, so that you can pay your employees more" and having the person at the other end just hang up, thinking it's some kind of Nigerian money-laundering scam!

There are 2 wonderful videos showing the folks who make some of Fair Indigo's products. These are people who not only live in impoverished areas, but are themselves disadvantaged physically. They refer to Fair Indigo's customers as "Anonymous Angels" for supporting their life-changing occupations. Watch the videos -- they are quite moving.

Hats off to you, Bill, and your entire team. You are truly making a difference in this world for a lot of people.

Loanables is now free!

Ryan — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 22:54:00 -0400

We are very excited to announce that we’ve been able to remove transaction fees from Loanables! Sharing your stuff has never been easier! We’ve been offering Loanables for Teachers at no cost since its launch, and instituted the Green Neighborhood program to reward neighborhoods who appreciate green values. We have now put this into effect for everything on Loanables.

This is an exciting milestone because our goal is to make it as easy as possible for people to loan their stuff out to others, and this simplifies the process to be purely between the Loaner and the Borrower. Both parties will still benefit from our Rental Agreement, which clarifies the responsibilities between Loaner and Borrower. And we have lots of enhancements in the works, including electronic facilitation of the security deposit and a new mobile-messaging system to speed up communications between Loaners and Borrowers.

Like what we’re doing? Please let us know ... or better yet, help us spread the word!!

What if everyone in the world lived like you do?

Ryan — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 00:06:00 -0400

On NPR today, I heard about this great website called Consumer Consequences. Basically, you answer a bunch of questions about your lifestyle, and it tells you how many earths worth of resources it would take if everyone in the world lived like you do. What a wake-up call!

I will, embarassingly, share my score. 10.4. That's right. If everyone lived like I do, it would take 10.4 earths to sustain us. My worst scoring category was transportation, which I imagine would apply to lots of folks who do a lot of driving by themselves (that's a lot of energy just to transport the weight of one person!)

Try it out (it only takes a couple of minutes) and share your score with us!

Loaners keep your engines running

Ryan — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 19:11:00 -0400

Have you ever known someone with a car or boat that just sat on their lot for years without being used? When they finally put in a fresh tank of gas and tried to start it up, what happened? It didn't start! Why? Because engines are meant to be used, not to sit there abandoned. When you use an engine regularly, the various seals and other parts stay properly lubricated and moist so that they do not dry out. It also keeps fresh gas and oil running through the system instead of letting stale fluids sit there. Simply put, an unused engine deteriorates over time.

This is one of the many great benefits of loaning your stuff out to neighbors. The extra use is actually good for it! I have found this to be the case with all of my engine-equipped Loanables, including my fishing boat and my lawnmower. The fishing boat is something I just don't use as often as I thought I would, and an outboard motor is expensive (the 25HP motor is worth more than the boat and trailer combined!) By sharing my boat, it gets much more use and stays in better condition than if I just let it sit there, deteriorating.

Same for my lawnmower, which I don't use these days since I pay the neighborhood kids to cut my lawn. A guy in my neighborhood rented it once because he has a small electric mower which is too small for his large lot. He wanted to rent it every other week, so now I just let him borrow it (free of charge) whenever he wants. He has even offered to service the mower for me the next time he borrows it! It has truly been a win-win scenario for both of us. The only losing party in this is the lawnmower manufacturer who missed out on selling 1 more brand new unit. But hey, I think they'll get over it...

Meeting people is the best part!

Ryan — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 00:15:00 -0400

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy the extra money that I earn from renting out stuff I'm not using anyway. In fact, I believe that for most people, their unused stuff can be the best investment in their "portfolio" when rented to neighbors for a small fee. But that's a story for another post...

I've found that the best part about loaning out my stuff through Loanables is meeting the Borrowers. I've formed friendships with some of the of the people who have borrowed my stuff. This was somewhat of a surprise to me. When I first started using Loanables, I thought that meeting Borrowers would be a hassle. After all, these were random people that I had no connection with. Isn't this the mentality that is so prevalent these days? If I don't know you, then I don't trust you. From what I see in the media, everybody is bad!

But it turns out that most of the people out there are -- believe it or not -- good people! Most of them are folks who live in my neighborhood, or at least my part of town. In a time when people seem to be drifting farther apart, it's nice to find something that brings neighbors closer together.