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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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Tell Me More
Small white sticker reads:Night & Day FurnitureVancouver, WA 98686Model # Cinnamon Futon Bunk BedMonth / Year of Mfg. November 2005Do not remove this label Fascinating and so informative. While they’re at it, could they print another sticker to address their wood sourcing practices, worker conditions, the toxicity of the finishes, and perhaps their end of life plan?
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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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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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American Manufacturing in a Backyard
In the fall of 2015, I was hired to strip furniture and put the easy pieces back together again for a small shop that sold upcycled goods in North Oakland. I worked outside, on the back patio of a woman’s house. I remember it being sunny and warm, being fit as hell (the 8 mile bike ride helped), and being crazy nostalgic for a different era of American manufacturing. Serendipitously, the book, “Factory Man: How One Furniture Maker Battled Offshoring, Stayed Local – and Helped Save an American Town,” was released just a few months earlier. It was a mesmerizing story that, growing up on the west coast, had never…
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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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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
