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I’ll Tell You What’s Rotten
If this was a bruised banana, would you throw the whole thing away? I bet you’d think to add it to a smoothie, or banana bread, or maybe you’d cut out the bad parts and put it on your cereal or yogurt. My dad’s solution was always to cut it in half and fry it. We grow up learning the peel is separate from the fruit. We’re encouraged to find creative uses because we know that the fruit is still nutritious and tasty—despite the shell’s condition—and that wasting food is a travesty, for the environment and for society. Why hasn’t the same education been provided for stewarding furniture? Why aren’t…
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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…
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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?…
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LFL Lives On through Furniturecycle
It’s time to call it what it is. A crisis. Over the last year while posting hundreds of photos of beautifully imperfect pieces of furniture on Instagram, I’ve asked this question many times–is this a crisis? Who says, and when? Will the waste industry tell us? No. The furniture industry? No. So, I’m doing it–I’m declaring a crisis. The data is too staggering not to. Loved Furniture Lasts, my accidental passion project that documented over 50,000 pounds of discarded furniture within two miles of my home in 15 months, of which 89% was reusable, is evolving. I’m pleased to introduce Furniturecycle, an Idea Lab that explores furniture waste from the…
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Whisking our Worries Away with our Trash
We’re so conditioned. This treatment of resources is encouraged by our profit seeking systems. It’s become normalized behavior to see precious resources packaged into goods, full of embodied energy, carbon, and labor, piled up on the street and not flinch. People may walk by and sniff it out to see if anything is worth saving, but that’s an imperfect solution and things degrade quickly when they’re left on the street, even when set out in perfect condition. This system says materials are more valuable as garbage than keeping them in and moving them through our local economy. Who benefits from this practice? In whose interest is it for us to…
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In Honor of Secondhand September: My First Chair
Have you heard of #secondhandseptember? Sponsored by @oxfamgb, it’s a pledge to not buy new clothes for the month of September. To raise awareness of fashion’s environmental and social footprint (it’s pretty humongous), people are encouraged to tag images on Instagram and twitter of their fabulous second hand outfits. Cool! Will this help normalize second hand goods, beyond fashion? The resale market of second hand apparel, according to a report from ThredUP (a large online clothing reseller), is expected to swell to $41 billion by 2022! That would double the size of the market in just five years: in 2017, it was $20 billion. Whoa, that’s a big pie. Tech…
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Fast Furniture’s Double Trouble
Padded seating-couches, sofas, chairs-is often purchased in pairs, which means it is often discarded in pairs. This both doubles the urgency and increases the opportunity around furniture waste. What do we want our furniture future to look like? Do we want to replicate the current fast fashion nightmare, where the average consumer buys 60% more clothes but keeps them for half as long? And where this churn sends one garbage truck of clothes per second to be burned or dumped; has created squalid labor conditions for the mostly women and girls who make our clothes; and is estimated to be responsible for 20% of the world’s industrial water pollution? Is…
