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Furniture Waste Isn’t just on the Curb
Some may wonder if it’s still a crisis when the furniture is inside of the bin instead of on the curb. Yes. Yes, it is. Americans throw away over 24 billion pounds of furnishings a year. We don’t even know how much of that should be treated as garbage. Quality or reusability of furniture is not measured in our waste system. What I tend to see, rather, is furniture is disposed of as garbage when it’s no longer *wanted*. Should the decision of whether to bury furniture in a landfill till the end of time be decided not by its condition but by an individual’s whims or an emergency eviction?…
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Furniture Waste Surges Amid Mounting Crises
My bike has been in purgatory since March with the exception of one bike protest. Last week I untangled it from the pile of cobwebs and leaves under which it was hidden. I pumped up the tires and everything. It was so awesome to be moving around again swiftly, in such a familiar, happy way, even with a mask. But, my enthusiasm for renewed mobility and a change of scene was soon exchanged for despair. I wasn’t emotionally prepared for the heaps and heaps of furniture sitting outside of so many apartment complexes. There were also (many) single pieces strewn about, per usual, which is crazy in its own right,…
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Oakland Commits To Achieving Carbon Neutrality by 2045
Huge shout out to the City of Oakland whose 2030 Equity and Climate Action Plan and a Resolution committing Oakland to achieving Carbon Neutrality by 2045 passed unanimously by Oakland’s City Council on Tuesday night. “These are groundbreaking steps for Oakland, setting the stage for our work over the coming decade. Achieving carbon neutrality by 2045 will require profound transformation of our building, transportation, and waste sectors,” read Shayna H. Hirshfield-Gold, 2030 ECAP Project Manager’s email announcement. It was an honor to be an adviser on the Material Consumption + Waste section, as a Board Member of the Reuse Alliance. You must check out page 70: “Support the Reuse, Repair,…
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LFL Lives On through Furniturecycle
It’s time to call it what it is. A crisis. Over the last year while posting hundreds of photos of beautifully imperfect pieces of furniture on Instagram, I’ve asked this question many times–is this a crisis? Who says, and when? Will the waste industry tell us? No. The furniture industry? No. So, I’m doing it–I’m declaring a crisis. The data is too staggering not to. Loved Furniture Lasts, my accidental passion project that documented over 50,000 pounds of discarded furniture within two miles of my home in 15 months, of which 89% was reusable, is evolving. I’m pleased to introduce Furniturecycle, an Idea Lab that explores furniture waste from the…
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Circularity in Furnishings
It was an honor to present Circularity in Furnishings, a story about my passion project, Loved Furniture Lasts, to the Sustainable Furnishings Council on May 21, 2020 as part of their Sustainability Essentials Webinar series. Summary findings: In 15 months, from Jan. 2019-Mar. 2020, within two miles of my home, I chronicled 592 pieces of discarded furniture. Added together, it weighed an estimated 50,578 pounds. Since weight in and of itself is not super useful, I graded them by condition and found 89% was reusable. Takeaway thoughts: This is not a waste problem, this is a lack of investment, infrastructure and imagination In a circular economy, downstream is the new…
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Wildness for the Weary
We’ve been watching “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea” documentary by Ken Burns. It was kind of a random selection and kind of a balm since our road trip to the Southwest to camp under the stars, last week, was cancelled, due to COVID. Wildness is a word that came up a lot in the first episode. Wildness. Wildness. I loved it. It stirred something in me. It reminded me of my own journey, which started forever ago as a young student in a new program, Environmental Studies, at a big university in a city shrouded in pollution. A university that didn’t celebrate Earth Day for the first couple of…
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A Chest Curbed by COVID Closures
As I knelt to capture this picture, I heard a voice over my left shoulder. A woman, dressed in full scrubs, hair net and face mask, which was pulled down, stood on the far side of her car that was parked at the curb directly behind me. She asked, “You like it?” I say that I do, as I turned around to face her. “It’s a brand new chest from Wayfair. We got it for my mom, but we had to lower her bed because the mattress was too high. It didn’t fit.“ She went on to explain how they took a load of things to Salvation Army but that…
