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Re-framing the Future: A Call to Action for a Just Transition for the Reupholstery Industry
‘Unite and rebuild’ proclaimed an article, in 2019, about how an industry once left to perish could be on the verge of a comeback. The idea that the National Upholstery Association, a brand new trade association started solely by women and dedicated to a trade full of tradition, honor and importance, had launched with such little media fanfare, infuriated me. Determined to imagine a narrative beyond the tired, formulaic piece about DIY upholstery or an upholsterer’s retirement, I wrote one myself. I typed that proclamation as one of the NUA’s newest volunteers, hungry to join others in collective action at the industry level. I knew already that reliance upon upstream…
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What I Learned From Studying Furniture Waste for One Year
Yesterday I presented “What I Learned From Studying Street Furniture for One Year” at the California Resource Recovery Association’s 45th annual conference. I’ve attended this conference once, as a volunteer in 2016, when I helped host a topic lunch around reuse and repair. In 2018, I proposed and won a pre-conference tour slot for the upholstery shop I worked for at the time. We had dozens of conference attendees come to east Oakland to tour our nearly 100 year old, locally owned, 10,000 square foot upholstery workshop. The opportunity to shift the narrative of and image around waste prevention—to include furniture refurbishment, replete with a team of skilled labor earning…
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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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Oakland Commits To Achieving Carbon Neutrality by 2045
Huge shout out to the City of Oakland whose 2030 Equity and Climate Action Plan and a Resolution committing Oakland to achieving Carbon Neutrality by 2045 passed unanimously by Oakland’s City Council on Tuesday night. “These are groundbreaking steps for Oakland, setting the stage for our work over the coming decade. Achieving carbon neutrality by 2045 will require profound transformation of our building, transportation, and waste sectors,” read Shayna H. Hirshfield-Gold, 2030 ECAP Project Manager’s email announcement. It was an honor to be an adviser on the Material Consumption + Waste section, as a Board Member of the Reuse Alliance. You must check out page 70: “Support the Reuse, Repair,…
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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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Regenerative Niches Unite
Farmers are being recognized as climate change warriors. When they adopt regenerative practices, they can suck carbon out of the air, improve soil health, and create diverse ecosystems. Its radically beneficial on many levels and I love it. But I don’t live in a rural environment, my neighborhood is covered in pavement. Surely cities have players who are regenerative practitioners, too. Right? All ecosystems need to be nourished in some way. What about repair/reuse practitioners, like reupholsterers? Don’t they fill a regenerative niche? They strengthen the social fabric, diversify the economy, and reduce natural resource consumption by extending the life of goods. Plus, they keep money flowing locally and are…
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Shift Economic Power -> Mitigate Climate Change
My town is struggling. Reminders are everywhere. Old approaches to how we house, employ, consume, and communicate continue to fall terribly short. We can all imagine what the caption to this image would say using conventional thinking. It would likely be negative, blaming, shaming. Reductive and extractive. What if, instead, we saw opportunity, promise, shared prosperity? What if our systems operated with a larger purpose, a regenerative approach that drove community wealth and circulated capital locally? If this couch was a valuable input to a robust local supply chain would it still be left outside to degrade? Can shifting economic power be a climate change mitigation strategy? Why not? #climatejusticenow
