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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…
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Furniture Reuse Thrives at Homeless Camps
For every couch that makes it on this feed, there are millions of others that don’t. (Americans threw away over 24 billion pounds of furnishings in 2015.) In my community, it seems the flow of street furniture goes directly through our many homeless encampments. Furniture cast offs from home and apartment dwellers often find new life within Oakland’s 4,000+ unsheltered population. Though not often talked about, this is reuse, as much as shopping on eBay or Craigslist is. In its most basic form, reuse is a survival skill. One that humans have relied on since the beginning of time. We can forget that when we’re lucky enough to choose to…
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Time to Redefine Best Practices
This is the last picture I took with a blue sky. It was a week ago. That might not sound long but it truly feels like forever when you’re locked inside with the doors and windows shuttered. We’ve entered a deeper level of isolation, and it’s awful. This picture, though, is heavy all by itself. This pile contains countless pieces of usable goods headed for the landfill. In the right corner, you can see a woman rescuing something from the heap. I asked if she found a treasure, and she responded excitedly that she did, “it just needs some TLC.” Arguably most of the pile fits that description. These west…
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The High Cost of Free
Free. How perverted that term has become. Is this pillow and chair actually free? Not really. Sure, you can take them without exchanging any money, which is its most common definition, but a ridiculously incomplete one. Air and water are examples of things that are actually free. Through photosynthesis, green plants create oxygen, freely, which allows us to live on this planet. And precipitation falls from the sky, freely, which fills our rivers, lakes and streams enabling life as we know it. These freely occurring, natural processes under-gird our entire human existence. Material goods are never free—there is a cost for and an impact from everything. We’ve reduced free to…
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Where’s the Rest of the Story?
“L.A. city data shows requests to remove illegally dumped, bulky or electronic waste, as well as household appliances increased nearly 19% in the first seven months of 2020,” @abc7la reported on Aug. 19, 2020. Why is that the end of the story, every time? Why won’t people pay to properly dispose of it? Why is proper disposal always framed as landfill? Why do we lack attachment to durable goods? We have a furniture waste crisis. How can we continue to feign surprise over this phenomenon? Who does this reductive narrative help? Who does it harm? Illegal dumping is a symptom of much larger forces. How do our systems— built on…
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Furniture Spotting on the Urban Savanna Draws Awe
I caught a glimpse of this from the corner of my eye as I was driving home from the grocery store last weekend. Like love at first sight, my heart started racing. I made an erratic u-turn, took my first right and bam, we were face to face. Up close, she’s even more magnificent: such majestic curves, and beautiful wooden grain. She sat alone under a tree with her leaf on proud display, almost triumphant. I took loads of pictures, like a spellbound tourist watching a lion lazying on the African Savanna, indifferent to my presence. That bright blue sky is nowhere to be found now. It’s been smoky and…
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Furniturecycle Featured on Sew Much More Podcast
I want to offer my deepest thanks to Ceil DiGuglielmo, host of the “Sew Much More Podcast,” for having me on her show last week. She was so gracious to include me as a guest among her cadre of home furnishings industry peeps. I appreciated her genuine interest in exploring furnishings from the bottom-up, which, she admitted, is a pretty different approach than she’s used to. We totally go for it and cover old lady furniture, IKEA, imperfect produce, Pinterest, big box stores and more. Take a listen here:
