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? No.

This feeds a perpetual system of extraction that leaves us all worse off. See, notably, the climate crisis, ecosystem destruction, and raging wealth and racial inequality.

Can we even imagine decentralized systems that collect and properly process unwanted furniture that employ creatives and skilled professionals, whose work feeds generative local and regional systems of furniture reuse, resale, remanufacturing, redistribution, etc.?

I can. Can you?