The Viable Marketplace

Most of the harm we do to living systems is hidden inside ordinary transactions. A usable chair goes to landfill because reselling it is a hassle. A working appliance is replaced because repair feels harder than buying new. Food travels across a continent when a sustainable producer sits a few streets away. None of these are dramatic acts of destruction. They are small, convenient defaults, repeated by millions of people, and together they drive extraction, waste, and emissions far upstream of where anyone can see them.

The Viable Community Marketplace is built to change those defaults. It is a digital platform that connects local residents with verified sustainable producers, circular economy traders, and second-hand sellers, and makes buying, selling, repairing, and reusing goods locally the easy option rather than the effortful one. We have already built and launched a working version of the platform, our minimum viable product. People can use it today. What we are raising for now is the work of bringing it to life in a community: onboarding local sellers and producers, running hands-on sessions where residents learn to list, repair, and buy locally, and growing the early base of users who keep a marketplace alive.

The ecosystem we work in is not a single forest or watershed. It is the everyday European consumer economy, and the pressure that economy places on land, water, and climate through what gets made, moved, and thrown away. The circular and sharing economy is one of the most direct levers ordinary people have to ease that pressure. Every item kept in use is an item that does not have to be manufactured from new raw material, shipped, and eventually buried. Our project gives a community a practical tool to pull that lever, and a model that can be carried from one neighborhood to the next.

Our approach sits within a wider movement toward regenerative and circular economics, and it aligns with the EU Circular Economy Action Plan under the European Green Deal and the national goal of a fully circular Netherlands by 2050. But the heart of it is local and human. It is the resident who furnishes a flat from neighbors instead of a warehouse, the maker who finds steady local buyers, the family that repairs instead of replaces. We aim to scale toward an active, self-sustaining community of users and sellers, and to prove a pattern that other places can adopt. We are honest that building real habit takes time and patient community work, which is exactly what this funding would support.