This 'Unrepentant Hippie' Wants You To Stop Throwing Your Stuff Away And Get Things For Free

Yerdle is an ecommerce site that is rethinking ecommerce. It relies not on money, but credits, not on buying, but trading.

Here's the idea: When you sign up as a new Yerdle user you instantly get 120 credits, which you can use to "buy" things on the site. Dig through your home or apartment and find your own things that you no longer want or need. Post pictures on Yerdle, with a suggested "price" in credits. Other Yerdlers can trade in their credits for your items and you can get other people's items with your credits. Once a deal is made, Yerdle offers low-cost, flat-rate shipping to anywhere in the U.S.

"We want to make online sharing as easy as online shopping," co-founder and CEO Adam Werbach, a self-described unrepentant hippie, told Business Insider. "We want to reduce the number of new things that you buy by 25%."

Before founding Yerdle, Werbach was the youngest national president of the environmental organization The Sierra Club and then worked at Saatchi & Saatchi to help big companies like Walmart cut down on their waste.

After soft-launching in San Francisco and the Bay Area, Yerdle is extending its services nation-wide today, and releasing its newly redesigned iPhone app.

"Our biggest competitor is inertia and laziness," Werbach says. People end up spending $15 online for a new blender because it is easy to order one on Amazon. Werbach wants them to realize that if they, instead, spend only a $4 shipping fee through Yerdle, they're not only saving money, but keeping one more used blender out of a landfill somewhere.

Yerdle plans to make money by offering a small number of credits for sale, so that users who don't have enough of their own credits from "selling" their goods, can still get objects that they want without waiting.

"We're trying to fix something that's very broken in retail right now," Webach says. "This is a purpose-driven business."