5 Questions to Ask When You See Discarded Furniture

A furniture waste crisis applies to well-made and fast furniture alike. Hyper-consumption = hyper-disposal. Don’t forget, Americans throw away over 24 billion pounds of furnishings a year. This is highly problematic.

Street furniture is where I most interact with furniture waste. All neighborhoods have it– rural, suburban, urban–and seeing it always sparks more questions than answers.

Like:
🔸 How do we make sense of the insane amount of orphaned street furniture? Is it laziness? Goodwill towards neighbors? An act of defiance? A cry for help? Resistance?

🔸Why are we so conditioned to quickly label it as illegal dumping rather than explore what’s happening and what’s at stake? Who taught us that? The waste industry, the group that profits from this waste?

🔸What do we get when we ask no questions? Business as usual.

🔸What do we get when we ask binary questions that oversimplify the conversation to good or bad instead of teasing out the complex systems that fuel this crisis? Business as usual.

🔸 Where is the accountability? Who is being protected? Who is being harmed? What power structures are at play?

🔸 Will we ever be able to see past what we’re taught and instead see the larger wasted opportunity, far beyond any one single piece?

I am talking about the implicit trade off of landfilling unwanted furniture rather than investing in regenerative systems that support local communities.

Misrepresenting unwanted furniture as premature waste costs us local investment in systems and infrastructure that can support green jobs and local ownership, reduce waste and climate emissions, fuel creative energy, and contribute resilience, pride and prosperity to our communities.

Image: At the end of a picturesque lane that leads up from the Pacific Ocean, a beautiful desk sits in front of a beach bungalow on the side of a two lane road, with a Free sign taped on both sides to capture drivers coming in either direction.