These days, the economic recession has many college students feeling blue over the lack of cheap entertainment. But lucky for us all, the launch of a new website this week could replace that blue hue with a healthy shade of green not only in our wallets, but also in our ecological footprints. It is called LendAround.com, it is free, and it just might change the way America watches DVDs.

LendAround is the brainchild of Tim Jackson, a former journalist who founded a $2 billion online auction company and later worked as a venture capitalist. Yet the inspiration for his latest project came from a desire to help out the environment, not for money.

“When I came home from a trip to Africa, I began to notice just how much stuff my friends and I had compared to what people in Africa had,” Jackson said. “It made me think what a shame it is that so much of the stuff that we possess does not get used and does not get to benefit other people.”

And with that, LendAround was born. In a way, it is like the lovechild of Facebook and Netflix, allowing you to borrow DVDs from online friends and then return the favor by lending a DVD of your own. Although only in its beta phase, LendAround is already fully functional and exceptionally user-friendly for only being online for three days. Not only does the website make it easy to search for titles among your friends’ collections and obtain detailed information and ratings for each title, but it also keeps track of where every DVD is at all times.

“I have actually come across people who say, ‘You know why I do not lend DVDs, because people do not give them back,’ and what those people usually find is that it is not that their friends are criminals who are borrowing DVDs and secretly selling them on eBay to support a drug habit. Usually people just forget where the movie came from,” Jackson said.

What is truly unique about LendAround, though, is the way it helps the environment by decreasing the amount of overall “stuff” consumed every day. Because most users will share with personal friends who they see on a regular basis, DVDs can be lent and returned by hand.

However, LendAround also supports an eco-friendly method for borrowing by mail. Users simply need to download and print a customized page with your friend’s name on it, place the actual DVD in one of those clear plastic cases that we all have lying around somewhere, wrap the case in the printed page and then mail it for only the cost of a stamp.

But the ability to save the Earth is not the only advantage LendAround has over Netflix and self-service kiosks like Redbox.

“LendAround is not an anonymous service like Netflix. You are not a customer of a giant corporate. What you are doing is cooperating with your friends,” Jackson said. “It is also very different from a kiosk system because with a kiosk the choice is limited to however many discs they can display on the front of the machine, whereas the friends I am sharing with have between them 3,500 DVDs. That is like a respectable size Blockbuster store.”

So what about LendAround makes it an ideal match for college students?

“I think college students have a couple of characteristics that make them particularly likely to want to do this,” Jackson said. “One is that they are totally comfortable with the Internet, and they are not scared of going to a website like their parents or grandparents might be. And the other is that they are on a budget, so they are willing to try something new if it can get them loads of free entertainment.”

To find out whether University of Wisconsin students would be willing to give LendAround a try, The Badger Herald interviewed students on campus to hear what they thought about the website.

“I’m concerned about the legal repercussions of lending DVDs, but I am fairly confident the way the current laws are written that such a thing is legal,” UW law student Kerry Creeron said. “But low cost and the elimination of DVD archival would be a tremendous boon, especially for college students who have limited storage space.”

Even some current Netflix subscribers like UW sophomore Michele Coleman were impressed.

“I think it is a great way to network and a smart idea to utilize the popularity of Facebook,” Coleman said. “I would definitely jump on the bandwagon if it takes off.”

While most students were intrigued by the idea of LendAround, there was still an overwhelming concern that DVDs would become damaged or not be returned. Yet, Jackson believes this issue will have the tendency to naturally correct itself.

“When you send and receive a DVD you get an opportunity to say what condition it is in, and if you damage someone’s DVD that gets recorded,” Jackson said. “So a number of your friends looking at your profile can see that you have damaged a DVD and just like the real world, you get a reputation for not treating your friends’ stuff well. We simply provide web tools that let the normal human behavior go as you expect.”

In the end, there is no telling for sure what LendAround’s status will be a few years down the road and what impact it will have on American society.

In the meantime, though, the website just keeps moving along, bringing people together and living out its motto, “What goes around, comes around.”