Let’s Begin at the End, Market That Is

Lucy and I passed 7 trees on one walk last week. The city offers a free tree pickup service immediately following the holidays. There are some simple rules to follow: no stands, no decorations, no (fake) snow. (They’re also supposed to be cut into small chunks, but few seemed to get that memo.) This makes it easy for the waste haulers to send the trees to the compost pile, not the landfill. They break down, new soil is born. Trees have an end market: a place to go to recapture their value.

Most furniture comes from wood, from trees. It’s treated and processed but its core is wood.

Yet, wooden furniture is discarded on the street everyday with no system to capture that value, embedded carbon, or extract its latent potential for other uses. It’s complicated, there’s myriad types and sizes, a variety of conditions, etc. I get it.

Even so, where is the end market for discarded furniture? The landfill? How ironic, since it has a global supply chain of “added value” invested in it. This linear system of taking, making, and tossing in the trash can’t be sustained on a finite planet with a growing population, and definitely not equitably.

We can’t close loops, however, without end markets. We can’t have end markets without assigning materials market value. We can’t assign materials market value when our systems continually devalue used products, stigmatize labor, and externalize the (huge) true costs of low quality, high turnover goods. Typically this is when government steps in. For example, composting green waste is required by California to help combat climate change; hence, a forced market development tool created on behalf of the greater good.

What lessons can we take away for discarded furniture? How can we grow thriving end markets that return value to what already exists? How can we encourage investments in green jobs to refurbish and reupholster this huge stream of discards? What would those mandates look like? Now there’s a climate change strategy…