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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.
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What do too many strays say about a system?
Who is to blame for the preponderance of furniture waste? Individuals? Cities? Waste haulers? Manufacturers? The system as a whole? A couch can weigh 200 pounds. It is hard to move. There are few places to take them. Used furniture can have pet dander and other hidden allergens. Street furniture are strays, used to being treated well by their previous families, now left to fend for themselves in elements they were never built to withstand. Exposure to city grime= premature death sentence. They know it. We know it. But what do we do about it?
