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Wish-cycling’s True Costs
Wish-cycling is the act of putting something you think/hope is recyclable into a recycling bin. Experts recommend that if you don’t know whether it’s actually recyclable you should assume it’s not because mistaken optimism contaminates the batch and often renders whole loads of recycling unsalvageable. According to Waste Management, their contamination rate for curbside recycling is about 25%. 1 in 4 items do not belong in that recycling bin, or as their website says, “That means that 500 pounds of every 2,000 pounds that we collect at the curb is ultimately discarded as non-recyclable.” Contamination increases costs, reduces efficiencies and sends even more materials to the landfill. I feel like…
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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…
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Prime Days Did Not Spark Joy
Over 175 million items were sold and shipped in one day or less during Amazon Prime Days—its two day birthday party which ended yesterday—boasted Amazon’s press release. What speed! What scale! Now, where do we squeeze in these millions of new things? In our clogged closets? The shelves are already bursting, or maybe not— maybe Marie Kondo was just preparing us for Prime Days? Way back in January it was reported that thrift stores nationwide were seeing huge increases in donations due to the popularity of Marie Kondo’s show, “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up.” One donation center in Washington DC saw a 367% increase over the same week the…
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Shift Economic Power -> Mitigate Climate Change
My town is struggling. Reminders are everywhere. Old approaches to how we house, employ, consume, and communicate continue to fall terribly short. We can all imagine what the caption to this image would say using conventional thinking. It would likely be negative, blaming, shaming. Reductive and extractive. What if, instead, we saw opportunity, promise, shared prosperity? What if our systems operated with a larger purpose, a regenerative approach that drove community wealth and circulated capital locally? If this couch was a valuable input to a robust local supply chain would it still be left outside to degrade? Can shifting economic power be a climate change mitigation strategy? Why not? #climatejusticenow
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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…
