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ARTICLES
GOING GREEN
FOREVER YOUNG
Providing tools for sustainable change BY MATTHEW BIDDLE
Photos by Stephen Gabris
O
ver the past seven years, the University Heights Tool Library has come a long way from “three rakes on a wall”; that’s how the nonprofit’s all-volunteer staff often describes its humble beginnings. These days, the bright lime and teal walls—and an upstairs storage space unseen by members and passersby—are jam-packed with thousands of tools, all available to rent for just twenty dollars a year. The goal: provide communities with the tools they need—literally and figuratively—to create the change they want.
In 2011, after struggling with an absentee landlord and working with his roommates to fix up their own apartment, then-University at Buffalo student Darren Cotton learned about the tool library concept that allows individuals, block clubs, and other organizations to rent tools and learn how to use them, all for a small annual fee. He opened the University Heights Tool Library on Main Street later that year, and, in 2012, it relocated to its current location on West Northrup Place in the heart of the walkable Heights neighborhood. “The Tool Library gives people access to tools to fix up their home, start a garden. We centralize those resources in one spot, and make it affordable and accessible,” says Cotton, sitting in the organization’s
adjacent CoLab space, where it hosts workshops, meetings, and other programs. “It’s not a new idea—tool libraries have been around for decades—but it seemed like a really good fit for the neighborhood, especially being a university neighborhood with a lot of transient renters who might not invest $200 in a chop saw but want to fix up their home.” In this way, the Tool Library is an excellent example of the sharing economy, a sustainable economic model in which individuals share resources rather than owning them outright (see sidebar). “Does everyone on a block need to own their own lawnmower if their plot of land they need to mow is like thirty feet by thirty feet? Probably not,”
Cotton points out. “That’s what a lot of members tell us—they’re happy to join because they realize it’s reducing their carbon footprint. When we’re buying less things, then less things have to be produced, and things that are being created are being used exponentially more over their lifetime than they would be sitting in someone’s basement or closet. Our goal is to get those tools out of basements, closets, and attics,” Cotton continues. “Instead of being used for twelve minutes [over their lifetime,] they’ll be used for 1,200 minutes or 12,000 minutes.” Today, the Tool Library has more than 3,000 tools, more than half of which were donated, usually by individuals cleaning out garages or passing on items from loved ones
