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The High Cost of Free
Free. How perverted that term has become. Is this pillow and chair actually free? Not really. Sure, you can take them without exchanging any money, which is its most common definition, but a ridiculously incomplete one. Air and water are examples of things that are actually free. Through photosynthesis, green plants create oxygen, freely, which allows us to live on this planet. And precipitation falls from the sky, freely, which fills our rivers, lakes and streams enabling life as we know it. These freely occurring, natural processes under-gird our entire human existence. Material goods are never free—there is a cost for and an impact from everything. We’ve reduced free to…
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Circularity in Furnishings
It was an honor to present Circularity in Furnishings, a story about my passion project, Loved Furniture Lasts, to the Sustainable Furnishings Council on May 21, 2020 as part of their Sustainability Essentials Webinar series. Summary findings: In 15 months, from Jan. 2019-Mar. 2020, within two miles of my home, I chronicled 592 pieces of discarded furniture. Added together, it weighed an estimated 50,578 pounds. Since weight in and of itself is not super useful, I graded them by condition and found 89% was reusable. Takeaway thoughts: This is not a waste problem, this is a lack of investment, infrastructure and imagination In a circular economy, downstream is the new…
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A Chest Curbed by COVID Closures
As I knelt to capture this picture, I heard a voice over my left shoulder. A woman, dressed in full scrubs, hair net and face mask, which was pulled down, stood on the far side of her car that was parked at the curb directly behind me. She asked, “You like it?” I say that I do, as I turned around to face her. “It’s a brand new chest from Wayfair. We got it for my mom, but we had to lower her bed because the mattress was too high. It didn’t fit.“ She went on to explain how they took a load of things to Salvation Army but that…
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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…
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Who Feeds on a Couch Carcass?
If this was an animal carcass, what would we think? First, that it’s a food source for other members of the local ecosystem. So we would expect scavengers to come and feast. We know that bacteria will help break down what remained, which would feed the soil, among other important activities. Looking closer, we know the bone structure would reveal how it adapted to its environment, the place it called home. In short, we’d get a tiny window into a moment in time that is part of a huge continuous evolutionary cycle. It may sound gruesome, but decomposition is a critical component to maintaining life on Earth. But, this is…
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Prime Days Did Not Spark Joy
Over 175 million items were sold and shipped in one day or less during Amazon Prime Days—its two day birthday party which ended yesterday—boasted Amazon’s press release. What speed! What scale! Now, where do we squeeze in these millions of new things? In our clogged closets? The shelves are already bursting, or maybe not— maybe Marie Kondo was just preparing us for Prime Days? Way back in January it was reported that thrift stores nationwide were seeing huge increases in donations due to the popularity of Marie Kondo’s show, “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up.” One donation center in Washington DC saw a 367% increase over the same week the…
