Furniture Waste
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A Couch, a Crescendo, or Both?
A sofa on a curb. No big deal; life changes, we get new things and discard old ones. Sending furniture to a landfill is considered a benign activity. Why? Who says? When is it time to revisit the merits of old assumptions? Who’s job is that? What if instead of just a sofa on a curb, it is really a window into an enormous system playing out all around us. It’s like background music that we’re so used to we can’t hear it anymore. That noise we can’t hear is the sound of extraction: take natural resources for lowest cost. Take human labor pay lowest price. Turn into goods for…
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If You Had One Word to Describe What You See, What Would It Be?
This chair is a beautiful opportunity. How can we leverage it to better our community?
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Creative Destruction and What to Do with What’s Left Behind…
Creative destruction often describes innovation and business cycles. How we buy and listen to music has undergone massive creative destruction over the last several decades: vinyl records lost to cassette players which lost to CDs which lost to digital files. As a result, record players are considered obsolete technology; however, what about this real wooden furniture? Is that obsolete? Should it be, just because it’s attached to a record player? What would a system look like that supported creating value out of what’s left behind? We need to focus on value creation, which leads to growing markets, jobs, reducing pressure on natural resources and more prosperity than burying things…
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Couches for Seating or Shelter?
What if the valuable humans who are left to rot in the streets are sleeping under a key that could get them out of their prison?
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Fast Furniture’s Societal Tax
Fast fashion, like fast furniture, is known for its cheap, low quality, high turnover styles. Conveniently, stuff is much easier to toss out when there’s no real financial investment, sentimental attachment, or cultural barrier. What’s not convenient, cheap, or fair is cleaning up after our disposable culture. Oakland spent 5.5 million dollars collecting illegally dumped waste in 2017. Pictured: a couch that could have provided a job for a delivery truck driver, a reupholsterer, or a thrift store employee. A couch that, instead of filling up the landfill with 200 pounds of natural resources, should have provided comfy seating in someone’s front room for 25 more years. A couch that…
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Call it What it Is
Looks like “Fast Furniture” to me. Fast Fashion is a force that has taken the fashion supply chain and planet by storm. Does anyone see the resemblance? Low quality, high turnover goods and materials, never meant to last long or be held on to, made for pervertedly low costs in unknown working conditions with horrible environmental impacts? I think it’s time to call it what it is.
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What do too many strays say about a system?
Who is to blame for the preponderance of furniture waste? Individuals? Cities? Waste haulers? Manufacturers? The system as a whole? A couch can weigh 200 pounds. It is hard to move. There are few places to take them. Used furniture can have pet dander and other hidden allergens. Street furniture are strays, used to being treated well by their previous families, now left to fend for themselves in elements they were never built to withstand. Exposure to city grime= premature death sentence. They know it. We know it. But what do we do about it?
