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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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Rico’s Chair
The people behind the chairs on the curb can be hard to track down, but I got lucky yesterday. As I stopped to photograph this piece, Rico, as in Puerto Rico, he told me, asked if I was looking for a chair. He stopped sweeping the sidewalk and came to show me how it popped out into a twin bed. He said he was letting this one go because he had too many chairs. I complimented the green and yellow art on the inside arm. “It’s Russian,” he said, eyes twinkling. Though he seemed to be offering the chair to anyone who stopped to look, he said a woman who…
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Secondhand Supply Convoy
Silly drawers sitting at a crosswalk. I can think of funny narratives about bad directions or objects on an exciting escapade but in my heart I think the truth is much more sobering. Oakland has over 4,000 homeless people on its streets, a surge of 47% in just two years, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. I believe these drawers are a tiny glimpse into a supply convoy of materials used to construct repurposed up-cycled shelters. Sounds Pinterest worthy, doesn’t it? Repurposed. Up-cycled materials. Tiny homes. But instead, it describes a devastating reality of homeless encampments. People are constructing temporary homes out of what is plentiful in their surrounding environment…
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In Honor of Secondhand September: My First Chair
Have you heard of #secondhandseptember? Sponsored by @oxfamgb, it’s a pledge to not buy new clothes for the month of September. To raise awareness of fashion’s environmental and social footprint (it’s pretty humongous), people are encouraged to tag images on Instagram and twitter of their fabulous second hand outfits. Cool! Will this help normalize second hand goods, beyond fashion? The resale market of second hand apparel, according to a report from ThredUP (a large online clothing reseller), is expected to swell to $41 billion by 2022! That would double the size of the market in just five years: in 2017, it was $20 billion. Whoa, that’s a big pie. Tech…
