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Furniture Reuse Thrives at Homeless Camps
For every couch that makes it on this feed, there are millions of others that don’t. (Americans threw away over 24 billion pounds of furnishings in 2015.) In my community, it seems the flow of street furniture goes directly through our many homeless encampments. Furniture cast offs from home and apartment dwellers often find new life within Oakland’s 4,000+ unsheltered population. Though not often talked about, this is reuse, as much as shopping on eBay or Craigslist is. In its most basic form, reuse is a survival skill. One that humans have relied on since the beginning of time. We can forget that when we’re lucky enough to choose to…
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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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Bearing Witness: Extinction
If I hadn’t asked a roomful of students and young professionals to raise their hands if they knew what reupholstery was, and if I had not bore witness to no hands going up, I might not have believed it. I was at a zero waste conference, in SF, in 2018. No awareness? None? A skilled craft that creates local resilience and reduces waste has already gone extinct in some young minds. Who will be the future customers, employees, and business owners of reupholstery services? Is this cause for worry? Yes, and during a climate emergency and with untenable economic inequality, the answer is a resounding yes. Flush with huge investments…
