In return i get complete peace of mind, free maintenance and the ability to update my furniture for no reason other than i want to.
I personally am pretty happy with renting most of this stuff but will be buying my own dtuff once i have my own house
It's a good option for certain lifestyles, but can equally become surprisingly expensive if not manged.
Um, they're not throwing it out. Someone else uses it afterwards.
But this illustrates exactly the problem. "If you're careful" -- meaning you wouldn't want the average one you see. Meaning there's going to be considerably more waste when people have to buy second-hand than if they just kept their own that much longer.
I agree that it would be more efficient if people kept their sofas for a decade, but they don't, and me buying the sofas they don't want is a better option than them ending up on a trash heap. Plus, I'll probably keep them for ten years. I buy high-end furniture second-hand so I can do exactly that, rather than getting a new Ikea piece of junk that falls apart in a couple of years.
I suppose the ideal scenario would be for manufacturers not to make rubbish and for people to be able to afford good furniture that lasts for decades, but we don't live in that world.
Its not an either or, you can buy second hand and keep your stuff longer.
This is about purchasing, if you're purchasing 2nd hand you do have to be careful because you don't have the same rights etc. The "average" may be perfectly fine, just like the average second hand car is fine. I think you're reading too much into "being careful", that's all.
The other reason is, if everyone just "updates" stuff for no other reason than "because they want to", then that's obviously going to tend to cycle through products more rapidly than if people didn't just "update" on a whim, even if the second-hand-ness wasn't an issue.
I must be a sucker, because I've been carrying some of it around for close to a decade...
You have to keep track, mentally or otherwise, of what's rented and what's not. You will treat the rented things differently, even if only subconsciously.
When the time comes to return it, you have to deal with a website or a flurry of emails. Probably there is some boxing and taping and printing and packing and mailing. You have to verify the return is received and monies are refunded.
I guess some money is saved, and perhaps reuse is encouraged, but at the expense of cognitive cycles and time.
I'd rather just buy. The ecological wastefulness argument strikes me as, like recycling, operating on very, very thin margins.