November 11, 2024 • 37 mins
The sharing economy can be a platform for keeping products in circulation and out of landfills until they are no longer usable and must be recycled. If we can get more uses out of things we currently throw away, we can reduce the need to extract raw materials from the Earth. Meet a pioneer in sharing, Daan Weddenpohl, founder and CEO of Peerby, an innovative Dutch platform at the forefront of the sharing economy. Peerby connects people within neighborhoods and communities, enabling them to share items that would otherwise remain underused, such as household tools, appliances, and recreational equipment. Peerby promotes sustainable consumption by reducing the demand for new products and fosters social connections among community members. Daan launched Peerby with the belief that shared resources and connected communities could make a significant positive impact on the environment, economy, and society at large. Peerby has grown into a platform that addresses the local challenge that underlies global over-consumption and waste. We delve into Peerby’s service, the challenges and opportunities of the sharing economy, and Daan’s insights on the future of sustainable living and community-focused innovation.
Daan describes his goal for Peerby as making it a Netflix for stuff, and the question is whether the digital infrastructure can help make physical assets as widely available at low cost as Netflix has made movies and television shows. To do so, we must first virtualize the physical economy, and we’ve heard from organizations like GS1 and TCO that they are working to launch product passports that document where products are manufactured, how the raw materials are sourced, and the distribution networks that deliver them to the consumer. Once we document product lifecycles, it is possible to manage their use, reuse, and even recycle them when they become unusable to reduce the extraction of raw materials and the carbon impact of the things that support our lives. But it takes an essential first step, the choice by people in their homes and workplaces to make what they have last longer, to share items like a drill or a truck to minimize the surplus inventories of material goods that have come to define consumerism in the 21st Century. You can learn more about Peerby at https://www.peerby.com/
Daan describes his goal for Peerby as making it a Netflix for stuff, and the question is whether the digital infrastructure can help make physical assets as widely available at low cost as Netflix has made movies and television shows. To do so, we must first virtualize the physical economy, and we’ve heard from organizations like GS1 and TCO that they are working to launch product passports that document where products are manufactured, how the raw materials are sourced, and the distribution networks that deliver them to the consumer. Once we document product lifecycles, it is possible to manage their use, reuse, and even recycle them when they become unusable to reduce the extraction of raw materials and the carbon impact of the things that support our lives. But it takes an essential first step, the choice by people in their homes and workplaces to make what they have last longer, to share items like a drill or a truck to minimize the surplus inventories of material goods that have come to define consumerism in the 21st Century. You can learn more about Peerby at https://www.peerby.com/
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:07):
Hello, good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you
are on this beautiful planet of ours. Welcome to Sustainability
in your ear. This is the podcast conversation about accelerating
the transition to a sustainable carbon neutral society, and I'm
your host met Tractliff. Thanks for joining the conversation today.
Let's talk about the sharing economy. Think of it as
a platform for keeping products in circulation and out of
(00:29):
landfills until they are no longer usable and must be recycled.
If we can get more uses out of things that
we currently throw away, we can reduce the need to
extract raw materials from the planet. And today we're joined
by a pioneer in sharing, Don Wodenpol, who is founder
and CEO of Peerbe, and innovative Dutch platform at the
forefront of the sharing economy. Peerbe connects people within neighborhoods
(00:53):
and communities, enabling them to share items that would otherwise
remain under used, such as household tools, appliances and recreational equipment.
Peerb not only promotes sustainable consumption by reducing the demand
for new products, but also fosters social connections among community members.
Don launched peerbe with the belief that shared resources and
connected communities could make a significant positive impact on the environment, economy,
(01:16):
and society at large. Peerbe has grown into a platform
that addresses the local challenges that underlie global overconsumption and waste.
So we'll delve into Peerbe's service, the challenges and opportunities
of the sharing economy, as well as Don's insights into
the future of sustainable living and community focused innovation. You
can learn more about peerbat peerb dot com and peerbe
(01:37):
is spelled pee rby peerb dot com. We'll be right
back after this quick commercial break to start the conversation.
Welcome to the show, Don, How you doing today?
Speaker 2 (01:53):
Thanks for having me. Yeah, I'm doing great today. How
are you good?
Speaker 1 (01:56):
Pierre's doing a lot of interesting stuff and we've got
a lot to cover. So what inspired you to start
a sharing community?
Speaker 2 (02:02):
Quite a few years ago, I was a CTO for
a software company and had I led a very independent
life in my own house, my own car, my own stuff,
and I didn't really need help from anybody. And that
changed dramatically from one day to another when my house
burned down, and suddenly I went from having or being
(02:25):
very independent to having to be interdependent and asked for help,
sleep on people's couches, borrow all kinds of items, and
it actually changed my mind about my desire to be independent.
I found that interdependence is a human superpower. The fact
that we're able to support each other and be there
(02:46):
for each other in times of need is actually what
makes us prospers. How we are as successful community as
human beings as we are today.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
That's a really interesting insight. Obviously, one that we're all
talking about these days. Is the world goes through a
lot of changes and there will be a in a sense,
the house is on fire already. So when you try
to bring people into this interdependent relationship, how do you
describe what pere we is? Is it a marketplace? Is
it a community? Is it a sharing library? What's the
right way to explain this idea to somebody.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
Yeah, I would say it's all three. You could say
it's a community of people that are willing to share
and borrow. It is a marketplace, although about a third
of all goods that are shared are shared for free.
What was the third word.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
Of a platform a sharing library?
Speaker 2 (03:38):
Sharing library? Yes, you could say it's a virtual sharing library.
Instead of having one physical location where we store everything,
basically the library is distributed across your neighborhoods.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
Yeah, I have signed up, and I found that the
first step, which I sort of created an inventory of
the stuff that I would be willing to share, it
was a little like saying, filling out the car cards
and a library. We don't have those anymore, but you know,
we used to be able to go to the card
catalog and go through it to find what we're looking for.
And it's a little like that, you're describing all the
stuff you've got. Where's the service currently available? Where are
people using it?
Speaker 2 (04:11):
So we first launched in Amsterdam in the Netherlands, and
currently one in four households in Amsterdam has an account
on the platform, and we are all over the Netherlands
and parts of Belgium, and we recently translated the site
to English and made it available in the United States.
(04:32):
And yeah, we're just getting started.
Speaker 1 (04:34):
Thinking about the extension of the life cycle of consumer products.
You like a drill or a vacuend cleaner. What are
you finding the greatest challenges are in educating users about
the value of that life extension, or is just the
message that this is a great way to save.
Speaker 2 (04:51):
I think what's interesting is whenever I tell people about
here be, they intuitively understand that it reduces waste. I
guess is the word, And I guess you can find
that waste in a very broad way. You can say
it's a waste of money to buy something that you
only need once. That's a waste of resources, it's a
waste of the emissions. In Dutch way word that's for.
Speaker 3 (05:13):
Spilling, which basically means to waste something that didn't need
to be wasted. That is, that is a concept that
a lot of people understand and get when they think
about the products that they bought that are collecting dust
in their sheds and their attics and their covered I
think they they intuitively understand that it reduces waste to
not buy those items.
Speaker 1 (05:33):
So do you find that they're motivated by that or
are they motivated by the connection to the community. Is
it or is it an amalgam of all those things?
Speaker 2 (05:41):
I think that is a motivation, but it's a it's
a scale, I guess is the word. So there's the
money and the and the effort and the that you
spend on on owning a product versus the effort and
money and convenience and the bonus of sustainability that you
get from borrowing a product. And I find that where
(06:04):
we are today, I think the pain of ownership needs
to be quite high, as it needs to be pretty expensive.
You really only need it once. It's probably a pain
to store. It's like a large item. When that is
the case, a lot of people start considering maybe not
owning it. And I hope in the future that we
can make this service so convenient, so normal, We can
(06:26):
make it the new the first go to solution for
you when instead of buying that you really first think
about how am I going to access this product? Can
I can I just access it? Or do I really
need to own it? Almost as a secondary solution.
Speaker 1 (06:41):
So how do people find and discover what's on Peerba?
Do they do a search on Google that's, you know,
looking for a hammer and it drives you to peerb
Or is it more matter that you've been doing outreach
and if so, what's that outreach look like?
Speaker 2 (06:55):
We have two ways that people find us. One is
that we do outreach, or in fact, we ask neighbors
that are already a member of the platform to do
outreach to their neighbors. It's invitation letters, so we help
them with a template and they'll distribute that in their neighborhood.
And we were amazed to see how excited people are
(07:18):
to do this because on average, we call them sharing mayors,
and on average our sharing mayors hand out eight hundred
invitations or like like deliver them to their neighbors her mayor. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
we were blown away when we when we sell these numbers.
Speaker 1 (07:34):
Okay, now, well understand why you have a quarter of
the homes in Amsterdam. That okay, that's extraordinary. So in
a sense, what you do is you've provided the solution,
but you're letting your users evangelize it.
Speaker 2 (07:45):
That's right. That's one part of the solution. So that's
how people get to know it and how they list
their items, and then we try to you know, keep
them engaged and remember that they can borrow items on
the platform until the moment comes that they actually need something.
The other half of it is that we basically google
people that search for an item on Google and we
(08:07):
try to show up there. And we find that people
that are already considering rental are a good group for
us to target because they have already decided that maybe
they don't need to own it, and then borrowing it
from a neighbors for a lot of people is a
suitable alternative.
Speaker 1 (08:24):
Have you had to raise money in order to get
here or did you do this organically?
Speaker 2 (08:29):
We did raise money. We also had subsidies. We want
prize money. Our biggest investor is actually our own user base,
So the biggest shareholder of the company is group of
craft funders that supported us.
Speaker 1 (08:47):
Really interesting sow in a way. Again, it's an organic
expression of people's desire both to connect and begin to
exercise that superpower. You describe the interdependence.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
I would say so, yes.
Speaker 1 (08:59):
Earlier asked about the United States, we're not such an
interdependent culture. Are you finding it as challenging to make
the same case here? What's your strategy to deal with
that problem?
Speaker 2 (09:10):
Yeah, that's a great question, and it's it's definitely it's different.
There's differences between the Netherlands and the States. I feel like,
you know, it's it's almost impossible for me to really
grasp what all the differences are because I grew up
in the Netlands, so I know it, you know, through
and through, and I've spent a lot of time in
(09:31):
the US. I spent over a year there in the
in the last twenty four months. But I feel like
I'm only starting to, you know, scratch the surface when
it comes to really understanding American culture.
Speaker 1 (09:42):
I think we don't understand it either.
Speaker 2 (09:44):
So it's okay, there's a and maybe there's no such
thing as one American culture, you know, it's maybe there's
many different cultures. Yeah. One thing that I strongly believe
in this is that we all have a sense of community,
and that if I'm able to with our community and
with our team develop a product that speaks to that
(10:05):
desire for community, that the this can work as well
in the US as it does in the Netlands. But
maybe the fabric of that connection is going to be
slightly different, you know what. I One thing I noticed
is that trust and safety, let's say, trust maybe needs
to be what's the word, needs to be earned more
in the US than where it's more given in the Netherlands.
(10:29):
So that's an interesting, you know, dynamic that we'll need
to deal with.
Speaker 1 (10:33):
I've spent a lot of time in the Netherlands, and
I agree that is one of the assumptions that underlies
the culture there is that we're in this together, and
as suppose to agree, it's because of the fact that
the country literally raised itself out of the sea.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
That is a big contributor. Probably, Yeah, yeah, it's you know,
we had to work together to make sure we had
all the water works in place to keep the water out,
and everybody has to contribute. Basically, you know, if one
person decides that they're not going to have the right
level of water. In Dutch, we have worked for it.
(11:07):
But I'm not sure what the English world is, but
I don't.
Speaker 1 (11:10):
Think there is one. I actually remember this about Dutch
and English, even though they're very closely related. There you
have developed this entire different set of concepts, right.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
Right, Yeah. Anyway, we have these hills that we that
we used to protect from the water. The people would
build these walls. So if one of your neighbors decides
not to participate, everybody else suffers because the water will
come in through you know, their part of the wall.
So you're you have to work together in order to
be able to live well.
Speaker 1 (11:39):
With the climate crisis escalating, I think maybe now is
the time for Americans to begin to think that way.
We'll see whether it turns out. But how's it going
in the United States? How much traction are you getting here?
Speaker 2 (11:51):
We are still very early days, I would say, we
have quite a bit of history with in the US. Actually,
the first version of our platform that we launched is
already I think it's probably a decade ago almost by now,
and it worked very well. When we looked at our
definition of working, it meant that if somebody was trying
(12:13):
to find an item on the platform, that they had
at least a sixty percent chance of finding it, and
we managed to do this in about ten cities in
the US get to this level. The challenge with that
platform back then was there was no business model underlying
the platform. This so the further we grew, the more
expensive it got, and it basically was getting too expensive
(12:34):
for us to maintain the platform. So we dealed all
the way back just to Amsterdam and experimented a lot
around the question can we find a business model for
consuming less? It's almost, you know, a contradiction. In the end,
we did in a way it was pretty simple. What
we do is we charge a membership, which is twenty
(12:55):
nine dollars per year to people that want to borrow
something and then we do a safety check and we
provide insurance to the lender so that everybody that's lending
knows it's safe. I can trust the person that's borrowing.
But that took a long time. So now we're back.
The platform has evolved, and we're now we're trying to
figure out how can we adjust this in such a
(13:17):
way that it's suitable for American cities in American culture.
Speaker 1 (13:23):
Well, there's another dimension of that geographic scale, and that's
the trade off between the benefits of sharing in terms
of reducing the environmental impact and the logistics impact, you know,
moving it back and forth, the repairs and everything else
that goes into keeping the library of materials in use.
What's the optimal size of a PUBE market?
Speaker 2 (13:44):
Yeah, that was a very there was an intriguing question,
and so I did some math and I tried to see,
you know, what is the maximum distance you could travel
for an average product before you're actually producing more carbon
through that trip than that you're reducing. And I was
actually quite surprised to see that you can travel sixty
(14:05):
miles or like one hundred and twenty miles back and
forth before you start negatively effecting before you produce more
CO two than you reduce. I was surprised by that number,
to be honest.
Speaker 1 (14:19):
That does sound like a very large number compared to
what I would have expected. So, as you think about that,
sixty miles, you pretty much can cover a major city
that way. But then there's the complexity within the city
of specific concentrations and materials relative to demand. And I
know you're not holding the inventory. That's a great benefit,
(14:41):
But how do you think about curating your communities in
such a way that you can bring the interdependencies into
really high focus, both environmentally in terms of the impact
and that social connection that you were talking about earlier.
Speaker 2 (14:58):
Yeah, so we tried to connect people as close live
as close together as possible for multiple reasons. One is
the carbon emissions from the transportation, but it's not just
the carbon. It's also convenience. Obviously, it's a lot easier
if you can walk around the block and pick something
up then if you have to go and drive sixty miles.
And we like to connect people, so we like to
(15:21):
build connections within neighborhoods. When people know each other, it
has so many benefits. There's so many positive effects of
having weak ties in your neighborhoods. People that have weak
ties in their neighborhood, they live longer, they feel safer,
they are happier. It's really it's quite incredible what happens
if you feel connected to your surroundings.
Speaker 1 (15:42):
Fascinating discussion. We need to take a quick commercial break.
We're going to be right back now. Let's get back
to the conversation with Don wadd In.
Speaker 2 (15:54):
Paul.
Speaker 1 (15:54):
He is the founder and CEO of the Dutch sharing
economy platform peerbe, which is available here in the United States. Don,
in addition to the subscribe subscription for being a borrower,
you also mentioned that you have be based sharing. Tell
us a little about how that works and is that
also potentially emerging as a new economic opportunity for people
to be a curator of a library of shared materials.
Speaker 2 (16:16):
It is it's up to the owner to decide if
they want to charge a fee for the items that
they're lending. And what we're seeing is that about a
third of the owners don't do not charge, They just
like to help out a neighbor. One third is what
I would call a very friendly fee. So maybe if
you lend out your power drill so many times that
(16:37):
needs to be replaced. You have earned enough to replace
the power drill, so it's not a commercial. And then
there's people that have very popular products. Cargo bikes are
extremely popular in Amsterdam, so there's people that are lending
out their bike every day and then they charge you
a fee where it's it's really almost like, yeah, an
(16:58):
additional income for them.
Speaker 1 (17:00):
Well, I can imagine once you start to do this
type of sharing that you also have more income where
you could potentially decide to be a provider of a
certain set of functionality in the neighborhood. Do you imagine
that that's a new way for people potentially to earn
a little bit of income as we shift some of
the ways that we consume and earn.
Speaker 2 (17:22):
Definitely, there's people on our platform that have I guess
the top ten of most popular items and are making
an extra income based on that. And for others it
helps them offset the cost of maybe expensive items that
they like to own themselves. You know, maybe they're amateur
DJs and they want to have a DJ set and
(17:43):
they share that with neighbors for a fee.
Speaker 1 (17:47):
So it sounds like, in addition to being a community environment,
a sharing platform and an economic opportunity. It represents almost
a new way of thinking about our relationship with the
materials we have the planet from, and our relationship with
one another. As you think about how the business will
(18:07):
evolve over time, do you expect to be taking a
lot more of that kind of transactional revenue we're describing
or is it always going to be subscribers paying for
the opportunity to search and borrow.
Speaker 2 (18:20):
The way I look at Kirie today is that it's
really just a version zero point one of an entire
ecosystem of circular economy that we will have in the future.
With here, we we're trying to we were trying to
figure out how can we kick start the completely new ecosystem.
(18:40):
Because ecosystems depend on a lot of players. We need repair,
we need logistics, we need the ownership of the products.
We need the people that want to use the products,
and most of this ecosystem doesn't exist yet. All of
our company models are based on linear economy. We take
(19:01):
the materials, we produce an item, we bulk ship it
to a country, then it goes from you know, a
big storage location to the homes and then to landfill
in one big truck. That's our chain. The circular economy
looks very different. It's a place where where products are
still created, but we need different types of products. We're
(19:22):
going to need products that are designed to last, easy
to repair, built for communities. So these products don't exist yet.
But you know, the current products that we have can
be somewhat suitable for sharing, especially the ones of higher
quality have a lot more use in them. So you know,
that's we didn't have to reinvent manufacturing just yet. Then
(19:43):
the logistics and the repair and the maintenance part they exist,
but they are still very challenging to make a full
sort of service ecosystem around that. So we figured that
the smallest ecosystem that can already work is the person
that has a product, the person that needs that product,
and if we connect them on a you know, in
(20:05):
a in the same location, they should be able to
share that product. And what we hope to do is
sort of start building that out to all the different
players in that ecosystem. So to add in repair services,
add in what my dream would be to have autonomous
self driving lockers that basically when you when you need
(20:26):
a power drill, that you open your front door and
there's a there's a little locker in front of your home.
You open the door and there's the power drill that
you know somebody maybe on the other side of town
put in it the evening before. So there's logistical systems.
There's products that maybe are no longer owned by a
single person, but a neighborhood buys them. All these things
(20:49):
do not exist yet, so we and that's why I
look at perbas sort of the smallest building block that
where it's already working the circle, and we want to
make that circle bigger and bigger.
Speaker 1 (21:00):
But one group that you didn't mention in that description
was the producer themselves. Have you thought about or talked
with some of these producers about their opportunity to maybe
not so much resell something, but to extract ongoing revenue
from making a product. And it also seems to me
that would encourage them to make products that last longer
in the first place.
Speaker 2 (21:19):
Absolutely, yeah, that would give them the opposite incentive of
the incentive that they have today. Right right now, they
sell a product, and basically the longer that product lasts,
the longer it's going to take for a consumer to
pay them again for a replacement. So they can they
cannot produce products that last too long because they're undercutting
(21:39):
their own business model. So we already tried some experiments
with product manufacturers where we looked at, you know, what
happens if they provide us with a product and we
circulate that in the community and the community pace for use,
and we saw that compared to retail in the end,
the manufactur was making more on that product than if
(22:03):
they would have sold it to a single consumer. Now,
there's still plenty of challenges because this sharing economy is
still relatively small, so compared to how much they can
make on selling products, this is still relatively small opportunity
for them. So I think it's up to us to
try and grow this to a volume where this starts
(22:25):
to make more and more sense to manufactures and they're
going to shift their business models because the volumes are
big enough for them to really make good money.
Speaker 1 (22:35):
Now, you mentioned that you provide insurance to people who
loan stuff. Are you finding that as a result of
ensuring it, people are less careful with it more careful?
Is the product lifespan actually longer than it would have
been if you had just had it in the shed
and used it every once.
Speaker 2 (22:53):
In a while, I would say that there is probably some
more wear and tear on products when you lend them.
That's also a reason why I encourage people to charge
a small fee at least because I think you know
that you want to sharing the item also, I think
also means sharing some of the cost in a way.
Sometimes I think people are being a little bit too nice,
(23:14):
But obviously when there's a reciprocity within the community, that's
all you know, that's all good, that's all fine.
Speaker 1 (23:20):
Do you pay claims? Though? Are people breaking stuff?
Speaker 2 (23:25):
It does happen, but it doesn't happen that often. To
be honest, I think because people meet each other, look
at each other in the eyes, no, this is my
neighbor's tool. They don't want to break that trust. And
so in the majority of cases, I think people are
very careful with the items. This is anecdotal because I
(23:46):
don't I don't know what the numbers are in the
in the you know, professional rental industry, but I wouldn't
be surprised if our numbers are much better. And then
rent anonymous rentals where you're renting from a company instead
of your neighbor.
Speaker 1 (24:00):
As you think about that though it also becomes almost
clear to a producer if they can change the mindset
of selling something once versus loaning it. That you could
take a power drill, for instance, that cost one hundred
and sixty dollars and for four or five bucks per use.
Are borrowing times limited in some way?
Speaker 2 (24:20):
Yes, I mean usually a charge per day.
Speaker 1 (24:24):
Okay, So you could literally think in terms of four
or five bucks per day of use hundreds of times
versus that one hundred and sixty or seventy dollars opportunity
to earn revenue. So I'm curious that you've mentioned you've
done some of these experiments. What's the end of the
experiment conversation look like with those companies? Do they go,
(24:47):
we get it, or we still don't get it.
Speaker 2 (24:50):
I think we're still at the point where they say, well,
we get it, but do we believe that this is
the future just yet the volumes will become big enough
for us to make this shift. I think maybe we'll
see the same thing as what's happening with electric cars.
At first, it was very challenging to even build a
(25:12):
single electric car. Some companies got into it, then it
started working, and then suddenly everybody wanted an electric car,
and now all the manufacturers are making them and they
see it. But yeah, I think it was only twenty
years ago probably that manufacturers will we're still still saying
electric cars. That doesn't work.
Speaker 1 (25:31):
When you think about the factors, the cultural, economic, political
that have influenced where peerbe thrives. What do you look
for when you're assessing a new market.
Speaker 2 (25:43):
Well, one thing I look for is how much impact
can we make? And I think you know, in Western
economies there is a lot of consumption and the average European,
average American consumption pattern. If we would replicate that to
the rest of the world, we wouldn't need fortify planets.
So it's you know, there's there's a lot that we
can do to have an impact on that, and I
(26:05):
believe there are with with this kind of sharing, you
can actually do more while using less resources. So in
a way, I think life can be richer while reducing
our footprint. So that's that's one part of the market
that I look for. What's very interesting for us is
countries that have many cities, because this is really a
(26:27):
city by city type of growth that we that we
see and whether we translate the product to to the
language of a small market or to a big market
that the amount of work doesn't change that much, So
we'd rather go for a big market like the United States.
And I also think that in a way, the US
is a is a very challenging market. You know, there's
(26:48):
a lot of competition. It's it's quite different from the Netherlands.
I mean, it's competitive in terms of attention because I
haven't seen many sharing platforms that do exactly what we do,
to be honest, So it's also a challenge, which I
think makes it interesting for me as an entrepreneur, but
I think also makes it shows that if we succeed
(27:11):
that this is a that this truly can be a
very big opportunity, so that we can get other stakeholders involved, manufacturers, investors,
so we can really give a boost to these ecosystems
that need to grow.
Speaker 1 (27:25):
So you also, and we've talked a lot about you
designed this to foster community bonds. How do you track
that impact and how does that inform that conversation about
what markets do we go into next? Do you do
you also look for social coherence in a market before
you enter it, or or is the fact that there
is little coherence an opportunity to create it.
Speaker 2 (27:46):
Yeah, that's something we're still learning about. I would say
that a certain amount of coherence certainly helps, but let's
say that it works at the moment. In the outance.
We see that it works better in cities where there's
still an opportunity to meet new neighbors because you don't
know them yet, versus maybe communities where everybody already does
(28:09):
know each other. So I think people it's an opportunity
to connect. So if there's opportunities to connect, then that
is that might be our best best bet.
Speaker 1 (28:19):
For another dimension of that is understanding what's in demand
in those communities, And I wondered whether or not you
might be thinking about focusing on particular product categories tools.
For instance, when I signed up and I went through
my inventory, I was kind of struck by the breadth
of what it asked me about. Do you have a hammer?
Do you have a log splitter? Do you have a guitar?
(28:43):
And as I started to assemble, I kind of recognized
how much stuff I don't use, which was an interesting
first way of reflecting on what peerbe was telling me about.
As you explore where things go, are you thinking that
there are particular product categories that are bruteful for you.
Speaker 2 (29:04):
So we go as broad as possible on purpose, and
there are clearly categories that are more suitable than others
we see. I think our top categories are indeed tools,
sports equipment, camping gear, a lot of party equipment. The
way I think of this ecosystem is that we are
(29:28):
we're like a sort of a TV bundle. So in
order for the bundle to work, we need to have
a lot of different types of channels on there. Because
there's not a lot of people that just care about
the weather and are just gonna watch the weather channel.
We need a lot of different types of interest so
that there's multiple touch points throughout the year where you
(29:50):
can where you can borrow something.
Speaker 1 (29:52):
This is really really encouraging to hear. I mean, we've
talked about the circular economy a lot on the show,
and it often has to do more with a kind
of a recycling approach. One of the questions that I
also wondered about is do you, at some point God,
this needs to be recycled and responsibly help or help
people responsibly recycle it.
Speaker 2 (30:13):
We definitely want to go down that path. One thing
that we're doing right now is when somebody claims insurance,
is that we first look at repair and we try
to find a suitable way to repair the product. If
the product needs to be replaced, we try to look
at a second hand option, so to already you know,
(30:34):
kind of make make make responsible choices there. What I
would love for the app to look like in a
few years is that with every product that you have,
you'll have not just the option to lend it, but
it'll be it'll it'll help you use that product in
the most circular way. So what I hope to offer
is a for every product that you list on that platform,
(30:56):
it's not just the opportunity to borrow it, but kind
of this into a portal to the circular economy. So
show you what the best ways are to maintain that
product and to keep it, you know, working as long
as possible, giving you instructions on what to do if
it's not working anymore, figure out you can repair it.
(31:18):
But also at the you know, when it's it might
be at the end of its life, to find good
ways to recycle it, and potentially I think what could
be interesting as well is if we have a large
inventory of similar items. Refurbishing companies might want to try
and tap into the supply and make offers. So if
(31:41):
you have a certain type of phone that would be
very good for the refurbishment market, that they say, we
can offer you fifty bucks now for that phone that
you still have lying around, and we'll take it and
refurbish it. So, yeah, we want to sort of become
the central point that can connect you to that whole ecosystem.
Speaker 1 (32:02):
Well, and I think ecosystem is the right way to
think about this, because those evolve and expand as new
life forms or business forms take hold. And so as
you think about where peerbe is over the next five
and ten years, not just in terms of geographic coverage,
but its role in the economy, how do you describe
where you're headed.
Speaker 2 (32:23):
I was going to say the Amazon of the circular economy,
but maybe I should say the Netflix for stuff. Yeah,
neither of those are perfect. And also I think with
a circular economy also comes a potentially a different type
of business that includes more stakeholders. I think a lot
(32:47):
of these companies are mostly focused on shareholder value. I
also hope that with the emergence of these new types
of circular ecosystems. I can also it's a company that
is owned by the ecosystem or by the community that
is using it, much more than the venture capital that
(33:09):
was used to create it.
Speaker 1 (33:11):
As you think about that, and particularly in terms of
the global South, we could potentially make the same range
of stuff luxury items to practical tools and so forth
available to everybody, but without all the waste that we
have done here in the North. In the first round
of this activity, are you going to go into all
(33:32):
of those kinds of countries or are you thinking that
this is limited to those more advanced economies.
Speaker 2 (33:38):
I definitely think there's an opportunity to leap frog some
of the consumerism that we've developed in the West and
go directly to a more sustainable way of consuming. Yeah,
I think that could be great.
Speaker 1 (33:53):
So if our listeners are interested in joining, and particularly
in an area that isn't currently active, how do they
get involved in how do they signal that they would
like to participate and bring their community into your world.
Speaker 2 (34:06):
Well, for now, they can email me directly. It's done.
It's like Dan with two a's at preby dot com.
I'm happy to talk to anybody in the US that
is that sees ways for us to launch in this new, new,
exciting market.
Speaker 1 (34:24):
That is a very transparent approach. Be careful what you
wish for. I hope that it ends up being a
pile of inbound emails in your in your inbox. But
thank you so much, Don for talking with us today.
It's really interesting what you're doing with Perby.
Speaker 2 (34:39):
Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (34:50):
You've been listening to a conversation with Don weddenpol. He
is founder and CEO of Peerby, a sharing platform that
has brought a quarter of the households in Amsterdam into
the circular economy and is now growing in the United States.
You can learn more and join peerbe at pierbe dot
com and by the way, that is spelled with two
e's pee r b y peerb dot com. Don describes
(35:12):
his goal for peerb is making it a Netflix for stuff,
and the question is whether the digital infrastructure can help
make physical assets as widely available at low cost as
Netflix has made movies and television shows. To do so,
we must first virtualize the physical economy. And we've heard
on previous episodes from organizations like GS one and TCO
(35:33):
that they're working to launch product passports, and these document
where products were manufactured, how the raw materials were sourced,
the distribution networks that deliver them to the consumer, and
so forth. Once these features of a product or documented,
it's possible to begin to manage their use, reuse and
even recycling of unusable products to radically reduce the extraction
(35:54):
of raw materials and the carbon impact of the things
that support our lives. But it takes an important first
step the choice by people in their homes or at
their workplaces to make what they have last longer, to
share those items like a drill or a truck to
minimize the surplus inventories of material goods that have come
to define consumerism in the twenty first century, and Peerbe's approach,
(36:16):
which has almost a decade long track record, is a
good first step. Take a few minutes to sign up
and add a few items. If you're in a city
where peerbe is already in use, you might get a
request for an item shortly after registering, But if you're
somewhere without a peerbe community, consider becoming one of those
peerbe mayors that don described and invite others to join you.
(36:37):
Your leadership, your example, can make an important difference in
the volume of waste that is choking the environment. And
another action you can take is spreading the word about
this episode or any of the more than four hundred
and ninety interviews in our archives. Writing review about Sustainability
in your Ear on your favorite podcast platform will help
your neighbors find us. Folks, you're the amplifiers that can
spread more ideas, so we create less ways. Please tell
(37:00):
your friends, family, coworkers, the people you meet on the
street that they can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio,
Audible or whatever purveyor of podcast goodness they prefer. Thank
you for your support. I'm Metracliffe. This is Sustainability in
your Ear and we will be back with another Innovator
interview soon. In the meantime, folks, take care of yourself,
(37:22):
take care of one another, and let's all take care
of this beautiful planet of ours. Have a green day.
Hello, good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you
are on this beautiful planet of ours. Welcome to Sustainability
in your ear. This is the podcast conversation about accelerating
the transition to a sustainable carbon neutral society, and I'm
your host met Tractliff. Thanks for joining the conversation today.
Let's talk about the sharing economy. Think of it as
a platform for keeping products in circulation and out of
(00:29):
landfills until they are no longer usable and must be recycled.
If we can get more uses out of things that
we currently throw away, we can reduce the need to
extract raw materials from the planet. And today we're joined
by a pioneer in sharing, Don Wodenpol, who is founder
and CEO of Peerbe, and innovative Dutch platform at the
forefront of the sharing economy. Peerbe connects people within neighborhoods
(00:53):
and communities, enabling them to share items that would otherwise
remain under used, such as household tools, appliances and recreational equipment.
Peerb not only promotes sustainable consumption by reducing the demand
for new products, but also fosters social connections among community members.
Don launched peerbe with the belief that shared resources and
connected communities could make a significant positive impact on the environment, economy,
(01:16):
and society at large. Peerbe has grown into a platform
that addresses the local challenges that underlie global overconsumption and waste.
So we'll delve into Peerbe's service, the challenges and opportunities
of the sharing economy, as well as Don's insights into
the future of sustainable living and community focused innovation. You
can learn more about peerbat peerb dot com and peerbe
(01:37):
is spelled pee rby peerb dot com. We'll be right
back after this quick commercial break to start the conversation.
Welcome to the show, Don, How you doing today?
Speaker 2 (01:53):
Thanks for having me. Yeah, I'm doing great today. How
are you good?
Speaker 1 (01:56):
Pierre's doing a lot of interesting stuff and we've got
a lot to cover. So what inspired you to start
a sharing community?
Speaker 2 (02:02):
Quite a few years ago, I was a CTO for
a software company and had I led a very independent
life in my own house, my own car, my own stuff,
and I didn't really need help from anybody. And that
changed dramatically from one day to another when my house
burned down, and suddenly I went from having or being
(02:25):
very independent to having to be interdependent and asked for help,
sleep on people's couches, borrow all kinds of items, and
it actually changed my mind about my desire to be independent.
I found that interdependence is a human superpower. The fact
that we're able to support each other and be there
(02:46):
for each other in times of need is actually what
makes us prospers. How we are as successful community as
human beings as we are today.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
That's a really interesting insight. Obviously, one that we're all
talking about these days. Is the world goes through a
lot of changes and there will be a in a sense,
the house is on fire already. So when you try
to bring people into this interdependent relationship, how do you
describe what pere we is? Is it a marketplace? Is
it a community? Is it a sharing library? What's the
right way to explain this idea to somebody.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
Yeah, I would say it's all three. You could say
it's a community of people that are willing to share
and borrow. It is a marketplace, although about a third
of all goods that are shared are shared for free.
What was the third word.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
Of a platform a sharing library?
Speaker 2 (03:38):
Sharing library? Yes, you could say it's a virtual sharing library.
Instead of having one physical location where we store everything,
basically the library is distributed across your neighborhoods.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
Yeah, I have signed up, and I found that the
first step, which I sort of created an inventory of
the stuff that I would be willing to share, it
was a little like saying, filling out the car cards
and a library. We don't have those anymore, but you know,
we used to be able to go to the card
catalog and go through it to find what we're looking for.
And it's a little like that, you're describing all the
stuff you've got. Where's the service currently available? Where are
people using it?
Speaker 2 (04:11):
So we first launched in Amsterdam in the Netherlands, and
currently one in four households in Amsterdam has an account
on the platform, and we are all over the Netherlands
and parts of Belgium, and we recently translated the site
to English and made it available in the United States.
(04:32):
And yeah, we're just getting started.
Speaker 1 (04:34):
Thinking about the extension of the life cycle of consumer products.
You like a drill or a vacuend cleaner. What are
you finding the greatest challenges are in educating users about
the value of that life extension, or is just the
message that this is a great way to save.
Speaker 2 (04:51):
I think what's interesting is whenever I tell people about
here be, they intuitively understand that it reduces waste. I
guess is the word, And I guess you can find
that waste in a very broad way. You can say
it's a waste of money to buy something that you
only need once. That's a waste of resources, it's a
waste of the emissions. In Dutch way word that's for.
Speaker 3 (05:13):
Spilling, which basically means to waste something that didn't need
to be wasted. That is, that is a concept that
a lot of people understand and get when they think
about the products that they bought that are collecting dust
in their sheds and their attics and their covered I
think they they intuitively understand that it reduces waste to
not buy those items.
Speaker 1 (05:33):
So do you find that they're motivated by that or
are they motivated by the connection to the community. Is
it or is it an amalgam of all those things?
Speaker 2 (05:41):
I think that is a motivation, but it's a it's
a scale, I guess is the word. So there's the
money and the and the effort and the that you
spend on on owning a product versus the effort and
money and convenience and the bonus of sustainability that you
get from borrowing a product. And I find that where
(06:04):
we are today, I think the pain of ownership needs
to be quite high, as it needs to be pretty expensive.
You really only need it once. It's probably a pain
to store. It's like a large item. When that is
the case, a lot of people start considering maybe not
owning it. And I hope in the future that we
can make this service so convenient, so normal, We can
(06:26):
make it the new the first go to solution for
you when instead of buying that you really first think
about how am I going to access this product? Can
I can I just access it? Or do I really
need to own it? Almost as a secondary solution.
Speaker 1 (06:41):
So how do people find and discover what's on Peerba?
Do they do a search on Google that's, you know,
looking for a hammer and it drives you to peerb
Or is it more matter that you've been doing outreach
and if so, what's that outreach look like?
Speaker 2 (06:55):
We have two ways that people find us. One is
that we do outreach, or in fact, we ask neighbors
that are already a member of the platform to do
outreach to their neighbors. It's invitation letters, so we help
them with a template and they'll distribute that in their neighborhood.
And we were amazed to see how excited people are
(07:18):
to do this because on average, we call them sharing mayors,
and on average our sharing mayors hand out eight hundred
invitations or like like deliver them to their neighbors her mayor. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
we were blown away when we when we sell these numbers.
Speaker 1 (07:34):
Okay, now, well understand why you have a quarter of
the homes in Amsterdam. That okay, that's extraordinary. So in
a sense, what you do is you've provided the solution,
but you're letting your users evangelize it.
Speaker 2 (07:45):
That's right. That's one part of the solution. So that's
how people get to know it and how they list
their items, and then we try to you know, keep
them engaged and remember that they can borrow items on
the platform until the moment comes that they actually need something.
The other half of it is that we basically google
people that search for an item on Google and we
(08:07):
try to show up there. And we find that people
that are already considering rental are a good group for
us to target because they have already decided that maybe
they don't need to own it, and then borrowing it
from a neighbors for a lot of people is a
suitable alternative.
Speaker 1 (08:24):
Have you had to raise money in order to get
here or did you do this organically?
Speaker 2 (08:29):
We did raise money. We also had subsidies. We want
prize money. Our biggest investor is actually our own user base,
So the biggest shareholder of the company is group of
craft funders that supported us.
Speaker 1 (08:47):
Really interesting sow in a way. Again, it's an organic
expression of people's desire both to connect and begin to
exercise that superpower. You describe the interdependence.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
I would say so, yes.
Speaker 1 (08:59):
Earlier asked about the United States, we're not such an
interdependent culture. Are you finding it as challenging to make
the same case here? What's your strategy to deal with
that problem?
Speaker 2 (09:10):
Yeah, that's a great question, and it's it's definitely it's different.
There's differences between the Netherlands and the States. I feel like,
you know, it's it's almost impossible for me to really
grasp what all the differences are because I grew up
in the Netlands, so I know it, you know, through
and through, and I've spent a lot of time in
(09:31):
the US. I spent over a year there in the
in the last twenty four months. But I feel like
I'm only starting to, you know, scratch the surface when
it comes to really understanding American culture.
Speaker 1 (09:42):
I think we don't understand it either.
Speaker 2 (09:44):
So it's okay, there's a and maybe there's no such
thing as one American culture, you know, it's maybe there's
many different cultures. Yeah. One thing that I strongly believe
in this is that we all have a sense of community,
and that if I'm able to with our community and
with our team develop a product that speaks to that
(10:05):
desire for community, that the this can work as well
in the US as it does in the Netlands. But
maybe the fabric of that connection is going to be
slightly different, you know what. I One thing I noticed
is that trust and safety, let's say, trust maybe needs
to be what's the word, needs to be earned more
in the US than where it's more given in the Netherlands.
(10:29):
So that's an interesting, you know, dynamic that we'll need
to deal with.
Speaker 1 (10:33):
I've spent a lot of time in the Netherlands, and
I agree that is one of the assumptions that underlies
the culture there is that we're in this together, and
as suppose to agree, it's because of the fact that
the country literally raised itself out of the sea.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
That is a big contributor. Probably, Yeah, yeah, it's you know,
we had to work together to make sure we had
all the water works in place to keep the water out,
and everybody has to contribute. Basically, you know, if one
person decides that they're not going to have the right
level of water. In Dutch, we have worked for it.
(11:07):
But I'm not sure what the English world is, but
I don't.
Speaker 1 (11:10):
Think there is one. I actually remember this about Dutch
and English, even though they're very closely related. There you
have developed this entire different set of concepts, right.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
Right, Yeah. Anyway, we have these hills that we that
we used to protect from the water. The people would
build these walls. So if one of your neighbors decides
not to participate, everybody else suffers because the water will
come in through you know, their part of the wall.
So you're you have to work together in order to
be able to live well.
Speaker 1 (11:39):
With the climate crisis escalating, I think maybe now is
the time for Americans to begin to think that way.
We'll see whether it turns out. But how's it going
in the United States? How much traction are you getting here?
Speaker 2 (11:51):
We are still very early days, I would say, we
have quite a bit of history with in the US. Actually,
the first version of our platform that we launched is
already I think it's probably a decade ago almost by now,
and it worked very well. When we looked at our
definition of working, it meant that if somebody was trying
(12:13):
to find an item on the platform, that they had
at least a sixty percent chance of finding it, and
we managed to do this in about ten cities in
the US get to this level. The challenge with that
platform back then was there was no business model underlying
the platform. This so the further we grew, the more
expensive it got, and it basically was getting too expensive
(12:34):
for us to maintain the platform. So we dealed all
the way back just to Amsterdam and experimented a lot
around the question can we find a business model for
consuming less? It's almost, you know, a contradiction. In the end,
we did in a way it was pretty simple. What
we do is we charge a membership, which is twenty
(12:55):
nine dollars per year to people that want to borrow
something and then we do a safety check and we
provide insurance to the lender so that everybody that's lending
knows it's safe. I can trust the person that's borrowing.
But that took a long time. So now we're back.
The platform has evolved, and we're now we're trying to
figure out how can we adjust this in such a
(13:17):
way that it's suitable for American cities in American culture.
Speaker 1 (13:23):
Well, there's another dimension of that geographic scale, and that's
the trade off between the benefits of sharing in terms
of reducing the environmental impact and the logistics impact, you know,
moving it back and forth, the repairs and everything else
that goes into keeping the library of materials in use.
What's the optimal size of a PUBE market?
Speaker 2 (13:44):
Yeah, that was a very there was an intriguing question,
and so I did some math and I tried to see,
you know, what is the maximum distance you could travel
for an average product before you're actually producing more carbon
through that trip than that you're reducing. And I was
actually quite surprised to see that you can travel sixty
(14:05):
miles or like one hundred and twenty miles back and
forth before you start negatively effecting before you produce more
CO two than you reduce. I was surprised by that number,
to be honest.
Speaker 1 (14:19):
That does sound like a very large number compared to
what I would have expected. So, as you think about that,
sixty miles, you pretty much can cover a major city
that way. But then there's the complexity within the city
of specific concentrations and materials relative to demand. And I
know you're not holding the inventory. That's a great benefit,
(14:41):
But how do you think about curating your communities in
such a way that you can bring the interdependencies into
really high focus, both environmentally in terms of the impact
and that social connection that you were talking about earlier.
Speaker 2 (14:58):
Yeah, so we tried to connect people as close live
as close together as possible for multiple reasons. One is
the carbon emissions from the transportation, but it's not just
the carbon. It's also convenience. Obviously, it's a lot easier
if you can walk around the block and pick something
up then if you have to go and drive sixty miles.
And we like to connect people, so we like to
(15:21):
build connections within neighborhoods. When people know each other, it
has so many benefits. There's so many positive effects of
having weak ties in your neighborhoods. People that have weak
ties in their neighborhood, they live longer, they feel safer,
they are happier. It's really it's quite incredible what happens
if you feel connected to your surroundings.
Speaker 1 (15:42):
Fascinating discussion. We need to take a quick commercial break.
We're going to be right back now. Let's get back
to the conversation with Don wadd In.
Speaker 2 (15:54):
Paul.
Speaker 1 (15:54):
He is the founder and CEO of the Dutch sharing
economy platform peerbe, which is available here in the United States. Don,
in addition to the subscribe subscription for being a borrower,
you also mentioned that you have be based sharing. Tell
us a little about how that works and is that
also potentially emerging as a new economic opportunity for people
to be a curator of a library of shared materials.
Speaker 2 (16:16):
It is it's up to the owner to decide if
they want to charge a fee for the items that
they're lending. And what we're seeing is that about a
third of the owners don't do not charge, They just
like to help out a neighbor. One third is what
I would call a very friendly fee. So maybe if
you lend out your power drill so many times that
(16:37):
needs to be replaced. You have earned enough to replace
the power drill, so it's not a commercial. And then
there's people that have very popular products. Cargo bikes are
extremely popular in Amsterdam, so there's people that are lending
out their bike every day and then they charge you
a fee where it's it's really almost like, yeah, an
(16:58):
additional income for them.
Speaker 1 (17:00):
Well, I can imagine once you start to do this
type of sharing that you also have more income where
you could potentially decide to be a provider of a
certain set of functionality in the neighborhood. Do you imagine
that that's a new way for people potentially to earn
a little bit of income as we shift some of
the ways that we consume and earn.
Speaker 2 (17:22):
Definitely, there's people on our platform that have I guess
the top ten of most popular items and are making
an extra income based on that. And for others it
helps them offset the cost of maybe expensive items that
they like to own themselves. You know, maybe they're amateur
DJs and they want to have a DJ set and
(17:43):
they share that with neighbors for a fee.
Speaker 1 (17:47):
So it sounds like, in addition to being a community environment,
a sharing platform and an economic opportunity. It represents almost
a new way of thinking about our relationship with the
materials we have the planet from, and our relationship with
one another. As you think about how the business will
(18:07):
evolve over time, do you expect to be taking a
lot more of that kind of transactional revenue we're describing
or is it always going to be subscribers paying for
the opportunity to search and borrow.
Speaker 2 (18:20):
The way I look at Kirie today is that it's
really just a version zero point one of an entire
ecosystem of circular economy that we will have in the future.
With here, we we're trying to we were trying to
figure out how can we kick start the completely new ecosystem.
(18:40):
Because ecosystems depend on a lot of players. We need repair,
we need logistics, we need the ownership of the products.
We need the people that want to use the products,
and most of this ecosystem doesn't exist yet. All of
our company models are based on linear economy. We take
(19:01):
the materials, we produce an item, we bulk ship it
to a country, then it goes from you know, a
big storage location to the homes and then to landfill
in one big truck. That's our chain. The circular economy
looks very different. It's a place where where products are
still created, but we need different types of products. We're
(19:22):
going to need products that are designed to last, easy
to repair, built for communities. So these products don't exist yet.
But you know, the current products that we have can
be somewhat suitable for sharing, especially the ones of higher
quality have a lot more use in them. So you know,
that's we didn't have to reinvent manufacturing just yet. Then
(19:43):
the logistics and the repair and the maintenance part they exist,
but they are still very challenging to make a full
sort of service ecosystem around that. So we figured that
the smallest ecosystem that can already work is the person
that has a product, the person that needs that product,
and if we connect them on a you know, in
(20:05):
a in the same location, they should be able to
share that product. And what we hope to do is
sort of start building that out to all the different
players in that ecosystem. So to add in repair services,
add in what my dream would be to have autonomous
self driving lockers that basically when you when you need
(20:26):
a power drill, that you open your front door and
there's a there's a little locker in front of your home.
You open the door and there's the power drill that
you know somebody maybe on the other side of town
put in it the evening before. So there's logistical systems.
There's products that maybe are no longer owned by a
single person, but a neighborhood buys them. All these things
(20:49):
do not exist yet, so we and that's why I
look at perbas sort of the smallest building block that
where it's already working the circle, and we want to
make that circle bigger and bigger.
Speaker 1 (21:00):
But one group that you didn't mention in that description
was the producer themselves. Have you thought about or talked
with some of these producers about their opportunity to maybe
not so much resell something, but to extract ongoing revenue
from making a product. And it also seems to me
that would encourage them to make products that last longer
in the first place.
Speaker 2 (21:19):
Absolutely, yeah, that would give them the opposite incentive of
the incentive that they have today. Right right now, they
sell a product, and basically the longer that product lasts,
the longer it's going to take for a consumer to
pay them again for a replacement. So they can they
cannot produce products that last too long because they're undercutting
(21:39):
their own business model. So we already tried some experiments
with product manufacturers where we looked at, you know, what
happens if they provide us with a product and we
circulate that in the community and the community pace for use,
and we saw that compared to retail in the end,
the manufactur was making more on that product than if
(22:03):
they would have sold it to a single consumer. Now,
there's still plenty of challenges because this sharing economy is
still relatively small, so compared to how much they can
make on selling products, this is still relatively small opportunity
for them. So I think it's up to us to
try and grow this to a volume where this starts
(22:25):
to make more and more sense to manufactures and they're
going to shift their business models because the volumes are
big enough for them to really make good money.
Speaker 1 (22:35):
Now, you mentioned that you provide insurance to people who
loan stuff. Are you finding that as a result of
ensuring it, people are less careful with it more careful?
Is the product lifespan actually longer than it would have
been if you had just had it in the shed
and used it every once.
Speaker 2 (22:53):
In a while, I would say that there is probably some
more wear and tear on products when you lend them.
That's also a reason why I encourage people to charge
a small fee at least because I think you know
that you want to sharing the item also, I think
also means sharing some of the cost in a way.
Sometimes I think people are being a little bit too nice,
(23:14):
But obviously when there's a reciprocity within the community, that's
all you know, that's all good, that's all fine.
Speaker 1 (23:20):
Do you pay claims? Though? Are people breaking stuff?
Speaker 2 (23:25):
It does happen, but it doesn't happen that often. To
be honest, I think because people meet each other, look
at each other in the eyes, no, this is my
neighbor's tool. They don't want to break that trust. And
so in the majority of cases, I think people are
very careful with the items. This is anecdotal because I
(23:46):
don't I don't know what the numbers are in the
in the you know, professional rental industry, but I wouldn't
be surprised if our numbers are much better. And then
rent anonymous rentals where you're renting from a company instead
of your neighbor.
Speaker 1 (24:00):
As you think about that though it also becomes almost
clear to a producer if they can change the mindset
of selling something once versus loaning it. That you could
take a power drill, for instance, that cost one hundred
and sixty dollars and for four or five bucks per use.
Are borrowing times limited in some way?
Speaker 2 (24:20):
Yes, I mean usually a charge per day.
Speaker 1 (24:24):
Okay, So you could literally think in terms of four
or five bucks per day of use hundreds of times
versus that one hundred and sixty or seventy dollars opportunity
to earn revenue. So I'm curious that you've mentioned you've
done some of these experiments. What's the end of the
experiment conversation look like with those companies? Do they go,
(24:47):
we get it, or we still don't get it.
Speaker 2 (24:50):
I think we're still at the point where they say, well,
we get it, but do we believe that this is
the future just yet the volumes will become big enough
for us to make this shift. I think maybe we'll
see the same thing as what's happening with electric cars.
At first, it was very challenging to even build a
(25:12):
single electric car. Some companies got into it, then it
started working, and then suddenly everybody wanted an electric car,
and now all the manufacturers are making them and they
see it. But yeah, I think it was only twenty
years ago probably that manufacturers will we're still still saying
electric cars. That doesn't work.
Speaker 1 (25:31):
When you think about the factors, the cultural, economic, political
that have influenced where peerbe thrives. What do you look
for when you're assessing a new market.
Speaker 2 (25:43):
Well, one thing I look for is how much impact
can we make? And I think you know, in Western
economies there is a lot of consumption and the average European,
average American consumption pattern. If we would replicate that to
the rest of the world, we wouldn't need fortify planets.
So it's you know, there's there's a lot that we
can do to have an impact on that, and I
(26:05):
believe there are with with this kind of sharing, you
can actually do more while using less resources. So in
a way, I think life can be richer while reducing
our footprint. So that's that's one part of the market
that I look for. What's very interesting for us is
countries that have many cities, because this is really a
(26:27):
city by city type of growth that we that we
see and whether we translate the product to to the
language of a small market or to a big market
that the amount of work doesn't change that much, So
we'd rather go for a big market like the United States.
And I also think that in a way, the US
is a is a very challenging market. You know, there's
(26:48):
a lot of competition. It's it's quite different from the Netherlands.
I mean, it's competitive in terms of attention because I
haven't seen many sharing platforms that do exactly what we do,
to be honest, So it's also a challenge, which I
think makes it interesting for me as an entrepreneur, but
I think also makes it shows that if we succeed
(27:11):
that this is a that this truly can be a
very big opportunity, so that we can get other stakeholders involved, manufacturers, investors,
so we can really give a boost to these ecosystems
that need to grow.
Speaker 1 (27:25):
So you also, and we've talked a lot about you
designed this to foster community bonds. How do you track
that impact and how does that inform that conversation about
what markets do we go into next? Do you do
you also look for social coherence in a market before
you enter it, or or is the fact that there
is little coherence an opportunity to create it.
Speaker 2 (27:46):
Yeah, that's something we're still learning about. I would say
that a certain amount of coherence certainly helps, but let's
say that it works at the moment. In the outance.
We see that it works better in cities where there's
still an opportunity to meet new neighbors because you don't
know them yet, versus maybe communities where everybody already does
(28:09):
know each other. So I think people it's an opportunity
to connect. So if there's opportunities to connect, then that
is that might be our best best bet.
Speaker 1 (28:19):
For another dimension of that is understanding what's in demand
in those communities, And I wondered whether or not you
might be thinking about focusing on particular product categories tools.
For instance, when I signed up and I went through
my inventory, I was kind of struck by the breadth
of what it asked me about. Do you have a hammer?
Do you have a log splitter? Do you have a guitar?
(28:43):
And as I started to assemble, I kind of recognized
how much stuff I don't use, which was an interesting
first way of reflecting on what peerbe was telling me about.
As you explore where things go, are you thinking that
there are particular product categories that are bruteful for you.
Speaker 2 (29:04):
So we go as broad as possible on purpose, and
there are clearly categories that are more suitable than others
we see. I think our top categories are indeed tools,
sports equipment, camping gear, a lot of party equipment. The
way I think of this ecosystem is that we are
(29:28):
we're like a sort of a TV bundle. So in
order for the bundle to work, we need to have
a lot of different types of channels on there. Because
there's not a lot of people that just care about
the weather and are just gonna watch the weather channel.
We need a lot of different types of interest so
that there's multiple touch points throughout the year where you
(29:50):
can where you can borrow something.
Speaker 1 (29:52):
This is really really encouraging to hear. I mean, we've
talked about the circular economy a lot on the show,
and it often has to do more with a kind
of a recycling approach. One of the questions that I
also wondered about is do you, at some point God,
this needs to be recycled and responsibly help or help
people responsibly recycle it.
Speaker 2 (30:13):
We definitely want to go down that path. One thing
that we're doing right now is when somebody claims insurance,
is that we first look at repair and we try
to find a suitable way to repair the product. If
the product needs to be replaced, we try to look
at a second hand option, so to already you know,
(30:34):
kind of make make make responsible choices there. What I
would love for the app to look like in a
few years is that with every product that you have,
you'll have not just the option to lend it, but
it'll be it'll it'll help you use that product in
the most circular way. So what I hope to offer
is a for every product that you list on that platform,
(30:56):
it's not just the opportunity to borrow it, but kind
of this into a portal to the circular economy. So
show you what the best ways are to maintain that
product and to keep it, you know, working as long
as possible, giving you instructions on what to do if
it's not working anymore, figure out you can repair it.
(31:18):
But also at the you know, when it's it might
be at the end of its life, to find good
ways to recycle it, and potentially I think what could
be interesting as well is if we have a large
inventory of similar items. Refurbishing companies might want to try
and tap into the supply and make offers. So if
(31:41):
you have a certain type of phone that would be
very good for the refurbishment market, that they say, we
can offer you fifty bucks now for that phone that
you still have lying around, and we'll take it and
refurbish it. So, yeah, we want to sort of become
the central point that can connect you to that whole ecosystem.
Speaker 1 (32:02):
Well, and I think ecosystem is the right way to
think about this, because those evolve and expand as new
life forms or business forms take hold. And so as
you think about where peerbe is over the next five
and ten years, not just in terms of geographic coverage,
but its role in the economy, how do you describe
where you're headed.
Speaker 2 (32:23):
I was going to say the Amazon of the circular economy,
but maybe I should say the Netflix for stuff. Yeah,
neither of those are perfect. And also I think with
a circular economy also comes a potentially a different type
of business that includes more stakeholders. I think a lot
(32:47):
of these companies are mostly focused on shareholder value. I
also hope that with the emergence of these new types
of circular ecosystems. I can also it's a company that
is owned by the ecosystem or by the community that
is using it, much more than the venture capital that
(33:09):
was used to create it.
Speaker 1 (33:11):
As you think about that, and particularly in terms of
the global South, we could potentially make the same range
of stuff luxury items to practical tools and so forth
available to everybody, but without all the waste that we
have done here in the North. In the first round
of this activity, are you going to go into all
(33:32):
of those kinds of countries or are you thinking that
this is limited to those more advanced economies.
Speaker 2 (33:38):
I definitely think there's an opportunity to leap frog some
of the consumerism that we've developed in the West and
go directly to a more sustainable way of consuming. Yeah,
I think that could be great.
Speaker 1 (33:53):
So if our listeners are interested in joining, and particularly
in an area that isn't currently active, how do they
get involved in how do they signal that they would
like to participate and bring their community into your world.
Speaker 2 (34:06):
Well, for now, they can email me directly. It's done.
It's like Dan with two a's at preby dot com.
I'm happy to talk to anybody in the US that
is that sees ways for us to launch in this new, new,
exciting market.
Speaker 1 (34:24):
That is a very transparent approach. Be careful what you
wish for. I hope that it ends up being a
pile of inbound emails in your in your inbox. But
thank you so much, Don for talking with us today.
It's really interesting what you're doing with Perby.
Speaker 2 (34:39):
Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (34:50):
You've been listening to a conversation with Don weddenpol. He
is founder and CEO of Peerby, a sharing platform that
has brought a quarter of the households in Amsterdam into
the circular economy and is now growing in the United States.
You can learn more and join peerbe at pierbe dot
com and by the way, that is spelled with two
e's pee r b y peerb dot com. Don describes
(35:12):
his goal for peerb is making it a Netflix for stuff,
and the question is whether the digital infrastructure can help
make physical assets as widely available at low cost as
Netflix has made movies and television shows. To do so,
we must first virtualize the physical economy. And we've heard
on previous episodes from organizations like GS one and TCO
(35:33):
that they're working to launch product passports, and these document
where products were manufactured, how the raw materials were sourced,
the distribution networks that deliver them to the consumer, and
so forth. Once these features of a product or documented,
it's possible to begin to manage their use, reuse and
even recycling of unusable products to radically reduce the extraction
(35:54):
of raw materials and the carbon impact of the things
that support our lives. But it takes an important first
step the choice by people in their homes or at
their workplaces to make what they have last longer, to
share those items like a drill or a truck to
minimize the surplus inventories of material goods that have come
to define consumerism in the twenty first century, and Peerbe's approach,
(36:16):
which has almost a decade long track record, is a
good first step. Take a few minutes to sign up
and add a few items. If you're in a city
where peerbe is already in use, you might get a
request for an item shortly after registering, But if you're
somewhere without a peerbe community, consider becoming one of those
peerbe mayors that don described and invite others to join you.
(36:37):
Your leadership, your example, can make an important difference in
the volume of waste that is choking the environment. And
another action you can take is spreading the word about
this episode or any of the more than four hundred
and ninety interviews in our archives. Writing review about Sustainability
in your Ear on your favorite podcast platform will help
your neighbors find us. Folks, you're the amplifiers that can
spread more ideas, so we create less ways. Please tell
(37:00):
your friends, family, coworkers, the people you meet on the
street that they can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio,
Audible or whatever purveyor of podcast goodness they prefer. Thank
you for your support. I'm Metracliffe. This is Sustainability in
your Ear and we will be back with another Innovator
interview soon. In the meantime, folks, take care of yourself,
(37:22):
take care of one another, and let's all take care
of this beautiful planet of ours. Have a green day.
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