Verte

The greenest product
is the one that
already exists.

Manufacturing accounts for most of a product's lifetime emissions. No amount of eco-branding on something newly built can undo that.
Verte surfaces the secondhand option the moment you're about to buy new, right on the product page. It's also the cheap option,
which is what actually moves a first-year furnishing a room for the first time.

Verte
$89 $34
SAVE $55

Safe to buy used

Check the door seal and confirm it cools within an hour of plugging in.


Avoids ~46 kg CO₂e of manufacturing, about 180 miles driven.

3 on eBay 2 near campus

Mini-fridge, the canonical demo product. Figures are illustrative here; every figure Verte actually shows carries a source.

✕ Buy new

It doesn't always say yes. On a mattress listing, Verte recommends buying new: hygiene risk and permanent compression make secondhand a bad trade. It's the one category the app argues against itself on.

The knowledge base

What's actually safe to buy used

Nobody has told a first-year that a used desk is a great idea and a used mattress is a genuinely bad one. This is the part of Verte that isn't just a price comparison.

Safe

Desk, bookshelf, dresser

Ideal used. Check drawer runners and that it isn't particleboard that's been left wet.

Safe

Mini-fridge, microwave

Check the door seal and latch; confirm it powers on and cools within an hour.

Check

Laptop

Ask for battery cycle count, confirm it powers on, and verify it isn't activation-locked.

Check

Desk chair

Test the gas cylinder: if it sinks under weight, that's a real repair, not a quirk.

Buy new

Mattress, pillows

Hygiene and pest risk, and compression is permanent. Cheap enough new that it doesn't sting.

Buy new

Bike helmet

Single-impact protection: you cannot see whether it's already absorbed one.

Where the numbers come from

A bigger figure isn't worth as much as a sourced one

The first question a good judge asks about a carbon number is where it came from. We'd rather answer that than impress with precision we can't back up.

eBay

Live. Real listings, prices, and photos from the Browse API, searched by product title and filtered to used condition.

Campus

Seeded. These groups have no public API, so this table is hand-seeded, and we say so plainly if asked. Seeded data described honestly costs us nothing.

CO₂e

Estimated. Published embodied-carbon figures per category, always shown with a tilde. We don't compute anything bespoke, and we don't imply precision we don't have.