Furniture Waste
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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 Discarding something fully functional when a fabric or shape feels outdated or out-of-style is a highly conditioned behavior and often, is intentionally, the easiest option available.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…
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Bearing Witness: Extinction
If I hadn’t asked a roomful of students and young professionals to raise their hands if they knew what reupholstery was, and if I had not bore witness to no hands going up, I might not have believed it. I was at a zero waste conference, in SF, in 2018. No awareness? None? A skilled craft that creates local resilience and reduces waste has already gone extinct in some young minds. Who will be the future customers, employees, and business owners of reupholstery services? Is this cause for worry? Yes, and during a climate emergency and with untenable economic inequality, the answer is a resounding yes. Flush with huge investments…
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Shift Economic Power -> Mitigate Climate Change
My town is struggling. Reminders are everywhere. Old approaches to how we house, employ, consume, and communicate continue to fall terribly short. We can all imagine what the caption to this image would say using conventional thinking. It would likely be negative, blaming, shaming. Reductive and extractive. What if, instead, we saw opportunity, promise, shared prosperity? What if our systems operated with a larger purpose, a regenerative approach that drove community wealth and circulated capital locally? If this couch was a valuable input to a robust local supply chain would it still be left outside to degrade? Can shifting economic power be a climate change mitigation strategy? Why not? #climatejusticenow
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Market Transformation or Cultural Transaction
We know how to account for embedded carbon and energy in products, but what about the cultural training to find beauty and seek potential in slightly imperfect things? Who provides the skills and training to work with existing materials rather than virgin ones? Our future climate reality will demand this mindset and this skill set. How are we preparing–do we see this as a market transaction or a cultural transformation?
