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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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Too Nice to be Landfilled, Too Imperfect to be Donated
Example #334,226,788. The size of the opportunity is as big as the challenge, if we’re willing to think outside of the entrenched industrial waste complex. Can developing local systems of furniture reclamation, rehabilitation, and redistribution create a positive feedback loop for our community rather than generate a one time source of profit for a waste hauler? Who are these systems built to serve? What power structures perpetuate the status quo? What assumptions do we rely upon to not question it?
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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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The Final Wish of an Old Table
“So let me get this straight, IKEA, the largest producer of disposable furniture, who after seven decades of filling up landfills with their low cost, single use stuff, who helped shift our collective consumption patterns away from reuse and towards fast furniture, and, as we have just 7 years and 77 days to make drastic changes to keep our emissions below the 1.5 degree threshold, according to the Climate Clock, are now offering to buy back their stuff. Super. For them, and their large private company. Then, there’s me. An old, real wooden coffee table who, for every year I live, provides a benefit to the planet, for not needing…
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I’ll Tell You What’s Rotten
If this was a bruised banana, would you throw the whole thing away? I bet you’d think to add it to a smoothie, or banana bread, or maybe you’d cut out the bad parts and put it on your cereal or yogurt. My dad’s solution was always to cut it in half and fry it. We grow up learning the peel is separate from the fruit. We’re encouraged to find creative uses because we know that the fruit is still nutritious and tasty—despite the shell’s condition—and that wasting food is a travesty, for the environment and for society. Why hasn’t the same education been provided for stewarding furniture? Why aren’t…
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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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Oakland Commits To Achieving Carbon Neutrality by 2045
Huge shout out to the City of Oakland whose 2030 Equity and Climate Action Plan and a Resolution committing Oakland to achieving Carbon Neutrality by 2045 passed unanimously by Oakland’s City Council on Tuesday night. “These are groundbreaking steps for Oakland, setting the stage for our work over the coming decade. Achieving carbon neutrality by 2045 will require profound transformation of our building, transportation, and waste sectors,” read Shayna H. Hirshfield-Gold, 2030 ECAP Project Manager’s email announcement. It was an honor to be an adviser on the Material Consumption + Waste section, as a Board Member of the Reuse Alliance. You must check out page 70: “Support the Reuse, Repair,…
