I’ll Tell You What’s Rotten

If this was a bruised banana, would you throw the whole thing away?

I bet you’d think to add it to a smoothie, or banana bread, or maybe you’d cut out the bad parts and put it on your cereal or yogurt. My dad’s solution was always to cut it in half and fry it.

We grow up learning the peel is separate from the fruit. We’re encouraged to find creative uses because we know that the fruit is still nutritious and tasty—despite the shell’s condition—and that wasting food is a travesty, for the environment and for society.

Why hasn’t the same education been provided for stewarding furniture? Why aren’t we taught to look past the shell (upholstery) to consider the condition of the frame underneath? Why do our systems still judge an entire piece’s worth based on its outermost layer?

As food rescue and composting programs mature and scale, I often wonder why furniture rescue has fallen behind in education and infrastructure.

Maybe it’s because the majority of furniture is truly disposable: single-use, low quality stuff. Perhaps the industry outgrew the “durable” moniker decades ago but hangs onto the illusion for survival. If this is the reality, could furniture soon be regulated like disposable plastic packaging? Are furniture brand audits in our future?

On the contrary, what if that’s not the case? What if the furniture industry does still produce durable goods? Then the current outlook is equally bleak, since over 24 billion pounds of it gets thrown away.

Either way, we have a furniture waste crisis.