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What I Learned From Studying Furniture Waste for One Year
Yesterday I presented “What I Learned From Studying Street Furniture for One Year” at the California Resource Recovery Association’s 45th annual conference. I’ve attended this conference once, as a volunteer in 2016, when I helped host a topic lunch around reuse and repair. In 2018, I proposed and won a pre-conference tour slot for the upholstery shop I worked for at the time. We had dozens of conference attendees come to east Oakland to tour our nearly 100 year old, locally owned, 10,000 square foot upholstery workshop. The opportunity to shift the narrative of and image around waste prevention—to include furniture refurbishment, replete with a team of skilled labor earning…
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Not Everything on the Curb is Fast Furniture
Our society is built on disposability at every level: culturally, economically, politically. While we champion investments in frictionless consumption—think one click, free overnight delivery—our systems of refurbishment, reuse, and redistribution remain woefully underfunded, difficult, expensive, and stigmatized. That’s how an old couch that’s made to last, but out of date, receives the same end-of-life treatment as a single-use couch made with glued together wood chips. Our system wasn’t built to tell the difference. Extractive systems, that prioritize disposal first, that externalize costs, that stigmatize labor and second hand goods, and that equate imperfect pieces with useless, are the challenge. Regenerative, place-based solutions are the opportunity.
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A Collective Blind Spot
Hidden in plain sight. In every town I visit, I find discarded furniture. I’m never looking for it. I’m just not blind to it in the way others are. No matter how much a piece stands out, once absorbed into the local rhythms, life dances around it like it’s not even there. It’s one of our collective blind spots. Why does every community seem to suffer from this same affliction? What does this mean locally, and at scale? More dump trucks? More startups? How did we get here? While it may be easy and popular to blame fast furniture, the situation is deeper, more complex. Who has benefited most from…
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Another Day, Another Free Pile
They’re so common in these parts. Passersby know the drill—take what you like and move on. Sounds nice and generous and in many ways it is, but it’s also a massive challenge. We can’t nurture a system of reuse one free pile at a time. Stuff perishes on the street, which takes it from having some value to no value, quickly. Tons of money is spent cleaning up stuff that is all over the place–Oakland has over 2,700 illegal dumping instances every month. Is there room to dedicate some money to collect, consolidate, refurbish, and redistribute/resell the stuff instead? We’ve been taught to look at street furniture first as waste.…
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The Conscious Builder Podcast
Thanks Casey for this opportunity to talk about furniture waste from the bottom up, normalizing reuse, the types of systems change we need, place-based solutions, and why it’s time not for a new sofa, but a new narrative. Listen below.
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Garage Sales in the Era of Free Piles
When I saw this sign last weekend, I did a double take. A garage sale, I remember thinking, people still do those? Upon reflection, I can see that’s a crazy first reaction, but not necessarily where I live. As Lucy and I walked on, I thought about how my neighborhood is really a big, dispersed, unattended garage sale. I often feel like I’m roaming the aisles of a thrift store when I’m out walking my dog. Our streets are covered in free stuff: whether in boxes or splayed on the sidewalk, there are piles of books, clothes, shoes, homewares, car seats, sports equipment, picture frames, art, vases, high chairs, dishes,…
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Is this a Furniture or a Waste Problem?
The solution will reflect our answer. Let’s choose wisely. If we want to perpetuate our obsession with short term corporate profit maximization above all else, then treating imperfect, unwanted furniture as waste makes great sense. The global waste industry captures all of the gains and their stockholders win. Meanwhile, landfill space shrinks, methane emissions increase, and leachate grows. The tyranny of new continues unabashed, and existing top down power structures remain intact. If, however, we want to build just, resilient, and more prosperous local economies, then we would harness these materials, incentivize collection and redistribution, and prioritize local wealth building. We know not all imperfect, unwanted furniture is waste. But,…
