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Ikea Sets its Eyes on Reuse
Ikea wants you to forget everything you know. Despite being famous for flimsy product, it now believes the future is all about reuse. A huge global brand, Ikea has more than 422 stores in 50 markets and sells over 9,500 products. It is well known for its snappy furniture designs, massive stores, affordable prices, and DIY at-home assembly. It helped make ‘flat pack furniture,’ something commonly known for its mass production and low quality, irresistible to young consumers. IKEA shoppers dominate the mid-20s-mid 30s demographic. Though IKEA bristles at being considered disposable, it is now calling attention to its need to ‘close the loop.’ Modern speak for recapturing product–often headed…
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Will Wins!
Will drove past this bookshelf on his way home from the laundromat. Instantly recognizing its good condition, he pulled over to take a closer look. His partner was in need of one, he told me, and he liked its look and heft. We shared our amazement of how much freely available, good quality furniture peppered our streets. I told him I saw a skinny black bookshelf earlier that morning just up the hill, if he needed another. Moments later we had it loaded into the bed of his truck, and a used bookshelf was on its way to a new home. Local sharing for the win. #savedfromthelandfill #climatevictory
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American Manufacturing in a Backyard
In the fall of 2015, I was hired to strip furniture and put the easy pieces back together again for a small shop that sold upcycled goods in North Oakland. I worked outside, on the back patio of a woman’s house. I remember it being sunny and warm, being fit as hell (the 8 mile bike ride helped), and being crazy nostalgic for a different era of American manufacturing. Serendipitously, the book, “Factory Man: How One Furniture Maker Battled Offshoring, Stayed Local – and Helped Save an American Town,” was released just a few months earlier. It was a mesmerizing story that, growing up on the west coast, had never…
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Imagining Benefits that Benefited the Long Term
How much does language influence our thoughts? I love this example. A hospital connotes care, even when applied to furniture. This combination of words provides a gentle, refreshing reminder that furniture should not be disposable. Well made frames are built to have many lives. Talented reupholsterers are trained to bring each owner’s specific aesthetic to life. This loving maintenance, also known as reupholstery, powers multigenerational reuse, is kinder to the planet, supports skilled labor, and enriches the local community. Beyond language, what about payment? A hospital is also synonymous with insurance. Companies’ benefit packages offer pet insurance, and student loan payback perks, why not material maintenance insurance? It aligns our…
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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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Love What Gives You Air
Precious trees. You spoil us with shade, natural air conditioning, water filtration and retention, oxygen, carbon sequestration, habitat, sound absorption and calming beauty. Your incredible functions make life on this planet possible, and you provide all of these benefits, free of charge. Our reliance on you doesn’t stop once you’re felled. Your wood, the natural resource you grew while freely giving us air to breathe, is an incredible and beautiful material from which we build our homes, our fences, and our furniture. These meaningful, long term investments can stand the test of time because of your material quality. Though wooden products can last for generations, humans are operating on ever…
