Tool Libraries as Hubs for Low-Energy Lifestyles: Co-designing a Proposal for the UK’s First National Tool Library Strategy

Tool libraries are community organisations that allow people to borrow tools and other useful items rather than buying them new. Alongside the tools themselves, they also provide many other kinds of support to their communities, such as trainings, skill sharing, informal advice, and retrofit assistance.

This project aims to understand the ways communities use tool libraries to make their homes more energy efficient. Working with a small team of community researchers from tool libraries across the UK, it will also develop practical resources to help tool libraries both to support low-energy lifestyles and energy efficiency in their local communities, and to communicate the impact of their work.

The project seeks to achieve the following:

• Develop a baseline understanding of how UK tool libraries engage with communities on energy demand reduction
• In collaboration with community researchers from UK tool libraries, co-design a policy-facing strategy for work with tool libraries to empower local energy transition
• Create a toolkit for tool libraries to develop new programmes to promote energy efficiency

Through semi-structured interviews with organisers from tool libraries across the UK, the first phase of the project aims to understand the different experiences of tool libraries in diverse community and geographical settings.

In the second phase of the project, community researchers will lead a participatory ethnography of the everyday work of four tool libraries to identify existing and potential strategies for supporting communities with domestic energy concerns.

Finally, through a series of community workshops at each partner tool library, the community research team will co-design a policy-facing proposal for a strategy for working with tool libraries as partners in the UK’s energy transition.

Tool libraries have begun to gain interest among policy makers as important community partners for building circular economies and reducing carbon emissions. However, little attention has been paid to the different opportunities and challenges that tool libraries might face depending on their location and the demographics of the communities they serve. This project therefore seeks to provide an understanding of the role of place in tool libraries’ work and to identify specific opportunities for tool libraries to support communities in areas that have been traditionally considered ‘difficult to decarbonise’.