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In Honor of Secondhand September: My First Chair
Have you heard of #secondhandseptember? Sponsored by @oxfamgb, it’s a pledge to not buy new clothes for the month of September. To raise awareness of fashion’s environmental and social footprint (it’s pretty humongous), people are encouraged to tag images on Instagram and twitter of their fabulous second hand outfits. Cool! Will this help normalize second hand goods, beyond fashion? The resale market of second hand apparel, according to a report from ThredUP (a large online clothing reseller), is expected to swell to $41 billion by 2022! That would double the size of the market in just five years: in 2017, it was $20 billion. Whoa, that’s a big pie. Tech…
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Love What Gives You Air
Precious trees. You spoil us with shade, natural air conditioning, water filtration and retention, oxygen, carbon sequestration, habitat, sound absorption and calming beauty. Your incredible functions make life on this planet possible, and you provide all of these benefits, free of charge. Our reliance on you doesn’t stop once you’re felled. Your wood, the natural resource you grew while freely giving us air to breathe, is an incredible and beautiful material from which we build our homes, our fences, and our furniture. These meaningful, long term investments can stand the test of time because of your material quality. Though wooden products can last for generations, humans are operating on ever…
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Fast Furniture’s Double Trouble
Padded seating-couches, sofas, chairs-is often purchased in pairs, which means it is often discarded in pairs. This both doubles the urgency and increases the opportunity around furniture waste. What do we want our furniture future to look like? Do we want to replicate the current fast fashion nightmare, where the average consumer buys 60% more clothes but keeps them for half as long? And where this churn sends one garbage truck of clothes per second to be burned or dumped; has created squalid labor conditions for the mostly women and girls who make our clothes; and is estimated to be responsible for 20% of the world’s industrial water pollution? Is…
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Out of Style = Out of Luck?
Bad chair day: When 90’s fashion makes a roaring comeback and appreciation of crop tops and chokers is high, but adoration of overstuffed floral chairs is not. Bad human day: We’ve built global systems that fuel planned obsolescence over local reinvention for the community good. Discarding something fully functional when a fabric or shape feels outdated or out-of-style is a highly conditioned behavior and often, is intentionally, the easiest option available. Good Earth day: Padded seating is highly malleable. A talented reupholsterer can breathe fresh new life into ANY well-made piece. The potential to customize and reinvent a seat/chair/sofa/couch is limited only by one’s imagination. Now that’s a strategy that…
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Back to the Future
When I saw these old, discarded chairs I slowed my bike and pulled over to take a closer look. I didn’t have much time because I was in transit, but I lingered long enough to imagine these chairs in their heyday. I envisioned a room with a happy hum of voices, people dressed up, laughter. Tables full of crudités and a big bowl of sherbet punch or a boozy eggnog. I pictured balloons and crepe paper leading to a banner signifying life milestones: happy birthday; welcome home; happy retirement. A record plays in the background. Life dances on… A perfect heirloom, chairs can be a token from one generation to…
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This System is Not Broken…
Detritus from a linear, consumption-driven economy. Some would say, see, our systems are broken! How can this be acceptable? My absolute favorite response is the sage observation that the system is not, in fact, broken. It is working exactly as it was meant to. Privilege, power, plunder. Period.
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Wish-cycling’s True Costs
Wish-cycling is the act of putting something you think/hope is recyclable into a recycling bin. Experts recommend that if you don’t know whether it’s actually recyclable you should assume it’s not because mistaken optimism contaminates the batch and often renders whole loads of recycling unsalvageable. According to Waste Management, their contamination rate for curbside recycling is about 25%. 1 in 4 items do not belong in that recycling bin, or as their website says, “That means that 500 pounds of every 2,000 pounds that we collect at the curb is ultimately discarded as non-recyclable.” Contamination increases costs, reduces efficiencies and sends even more materials to the landfill. I feel like…
