Nobody owns anything. We simply rent it before it goes into a landfill.

When you buy or accept something for free, that item becomes your responsibility for the life of that product. Unfortunately, most of the products we buy, because of how they are made and how they are packaged, have a destructive afterlife that can live well past our grandchildren’s grandchildren.

While some countries are trying to force manufacturers to take back, recycle or dispose of their “expired” goods, the responsibility has largely been placed on the customer. After all, we bought it. It’s ours now. It’s not their problem anymore, right?

Some of us choose to throw out our goods long before their time is due. Others save, reuse, donate, resell, or recycle. Like a hot potato, once an item is out of our hands, it’s no longer our problem either. The responsibility simply gets paid forward. You can choose to accept this responsibility or you can be part of the solution.

Many of us have become concerned with what is in our products and less concerned about where they’ve been, how they got there, and where they’re going, which are also important sustainability questions.

As one solution, we’d like one of you brainiacs to come up with a tracking system whereby anyone can track the life of a single product. Every item that is produced would get a unique code that can be tracked from an online database. Sorta like you can with U.S. paper money via Where’s George? or The Canadian Money Tracker.

How cool would it be if you could learn where a product was born, where it traveled to, and who possessed it before you and after you? Not only could we gain insight into things like where the product was made, what might contribute to its carbon footprint – i.e. distanced traveled, but we could also see, in real-time, a product’s average lifespan as well as connect to a network of people who are collectively accountable for the life and death of that product.

Dooo it.