Furniture Waste
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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 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,…
