About us
Who
The Library of STUFF is a project of Mullum Cares Incorporated. A non profit organisation that was founded in 2016 to inspire and enable resource conservation in the Northern Rivers. You can see all things Mullum Cares at mullumcares.com.au.
We have always relied on Active Members to open the Library for our members who haven’t the capacity to help. Our Active Managers also undertake all of the inbetween running around tasks required to manage and improve the initiative. In October 2023 we doubled the membership fee for those who can’t help in an attempt to fix the imbalance between Active and Supported Members. Sadly that didn’t work. It appears we have attracted members who love the idea of being able to access items without making the financial outlay to pay for the items outright. Members who likely feel good that they are having a lighter impact on the planet and that the initiative is supporting many others like them.
But not enough members have been inspired to dedicate 3 hours a fortnight to help make it possible.
So it is with great regret that we have had to stop accepting new members unless they want to join the Active Member team.
Please read the entire front page of the website to understand the current membership opportunity. If you are happy to join a club where your contribution will add to many hands making light work to share and care for the Library items and share them amongst the members then it’s very likely you can still join today!
What
The Library of STUFF is a community library filled with good quality items that are shared amongst its members. It provides affordable access to items for the Byron Shire community, including individuals, families and Non Profit organisations and events. We prioritise quality and repairability above all other considerations when purchasing new items. We are most pleased with our ability to buy and receive after sales support from Farmcare for gardening tools we have purchased. Their sales and after sales service is becoming a rare quality in a retail business.
The Library of Stuff operates on the traditional land of the Bundjalung Nation. We acknowledge and pay respect to the traditional custodians of this land, past, present and emerging, and recognise that sovereignty was never ceded.
Where & When
The Library is located in the brick shed on the south side of the Mullumbimby Community Hall (formerly the Scout Hall) on River Terrace (behind the post office). Please see our home page for any disruption to these standard opening hours:
Thursday 3 – 5pm
Saturday 9 – 11am
Why
The inspiration for the Library of Stuff name came from Annie Leonard’s Story of Stuff mini documentary that details the detrimental effects of increasing consumption of low-quality consumer goods. These goods use materials extracted from the earth, some are finite, most are not renewing at the rate of extraction. These goods have a massive emissions impact from extraction to production to transport to disposal. These goods are often made by people who are not paid fairly and in countries who’s environmental protection rules are not as robust as Australia’s.
Borrow instead of Buy is the Library’s Call to Action. It asks members to forgo convenience for the benefit of others. Those others include the people whose lands are exploited to extract the raw materials, these people are often also exploited as western pursuit for ‘cheap’ drives manufacturers to scale the globe for places they can pay the least to the people needed to make stuff. After the Rana Plaza collapse in Bangladesh, pressure to improve working conditions for women sewing clothes resulted in a migration of manufacturing away from that region to places like Africa where the cost of increased safety measures wasn’t adding to the cost of labor.
Buy Better is our secondary focus. We connect members with the benefits of using better quality items whereever possible. When we buy we buy good quality and we strive to take great care of our items so once we decide they need to be moved on from a high use environment, a local person or group will be able to continue using the item for as long as possible.
Behaviour Works Roadmap to Circular Economy project has lots of great intel on the problem and solutions to over consumption and production of goods. Borrowing/Renting are the most impactful behaviours you can do to reduce the unsustainable waste of the planets finite resources. Here’s the one pager and all information about their project can be found at : https://www.behaviourworksaustralia.org/major-project/responsible-consumption-behavioural-roadmap-to-circular-consumption
Subscribe for Updates
It is imperative once you are a member that you receive and read our email communications. We send them less frequently than monthly so we wont overload your inbox! We post more regularly on Facebook and Insta if your into either of those platforms.
Our Impact
The Library has grown organically with very little promotion as we are constantly limitied by space and volunteer capacity. In 2021 we received a donation that allowed us to employ our Co Founder, Celine Massa, to work on Amplifying the Impact of our operation in order to demonstrate its benefits to the community and the environment. Two Impact Reports – see below – were produced by Celine with this funding which has now been exhausted.
We aspire to grow the initiative into a self sustaining operation that is financially capable of employing a permanent staff member. We are a way off this goal and reject the obvious solution which is to focus on growing our only source of income, membership fees. More members without more stuff would lead to reduced access to items and with the cost of square footage in the Byron Shire we are always restricted by physical space.
More work to investigate other income streams is underway with the University of Queensland assisting with the research. If you or someone you know is in the position to make a tax deductible donation to help us move closer to a position of financial viability please see our Donation tab for details. Money comes from selling things and our purpose being to encourage people NOT to buy but borrow instead presents a unique but obvious challenge to our plight.
Winner of Byron Shire's Community Initiative of the Year Award
On January 27 the Byron Shire Council announced it’s annual awards that included their Environmental Initiative of the Year Award which went to Bangalow Koala’s. The judges felt that the Library of Stuff must be acknowledged for it’s sucess and impact both environmentally and socially so they created a new category, the Community Initiative of the Year Award and awarded it to us!