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5 Questions to Ask When You See Discarded Furniture
A furniture waste crisis applies to well-made and fast furniture alike. Hyper-consumption = hyper-disposal. Don’t forget, Americans throw away over 24 billion pounds of furnishings a year. This is highly problematic. Street furniture is where I most interact with furniture waste. All neighborhoods have it– rural, suburban, urban–and seeing it always sparks more questions than answers. Like:🔸 How do we make sense of the insane amount of orphaned street furniture? Is it laziness? Goodwill towards neighbors? An act of defiance? A cry for help? Resistance? 🔸Why are we so conditioned to quickly label it as illegal dumping rather than explore what’s happening and what’s at stake? Who taught us that?…
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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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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…
