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A Couch, a Crescendo, or Both?
A sofa on a curb. No big deal; life changes, we get new things and discard old ones. Sending furniture to a landfill is considered a benign activity. Why? Who says? When is it time to revisit the merits of old assumptions? Who’s job is that? What if instead of just a sofa on a curb, it is really a window into an enormous system playing out all around us. It’s like background music that we’re so used to we can’t hear it anymore. That noise we can’t hear is the sound of extraction: take natural resources for lowest cost. Take human labor pay lowest price. Turn into goods for…
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Fast Furniture’s Societal Tax
Fast fashion, like fast furniture, is known for its cheap, low quality, high turnover styles. Conveniently, stuff is much easier to toss out when there’s no real financial investment, sentimental attachment, or cultural barrier. What’s not convenient, cheap, or fair is cleaning up after our disposable culture. Oakland spent 5.5 million dollars collecting illegally dumped waste in 2017. Pictured: a couch that could have provided a job for a delivery truck driver, a reupholsterer, or a thrift store employee. A couch that, instead of filling up the landfill with 200 pounds of natural resources, should have provided comfy seating in someone’s front room for 25 more years. A couch that…
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Call it What it Is
Looks like “Fast Furniture” to me. Fast Fashion is a force that has taken the fashion supply chain and planet by storm. Does anyone see the resemblance? Low quality, high turnover goods and materials, never meant to last long or be held on to, made for pervertedly low costs in unknown working conditions with horrible environmental impacts? I think it’s time to call it what it is.
