-
Re-framing the Future: A Call to Action for a Just Transition for the Reupholstery Industry
‘Unite and rebuild’ proclaimed an article, in 2019, about how an industry once left to perish could be on the verge of a comeback. The idea that the National Upholstery Association, a brand new trade association started solely by women and dedicated to a trade full of tradition, honor and importance, had launched with such little media fanfare, infuriated me. Determined to imagine a narrative beyond the tired, formulaic piece about DIY upholstery or an upholsterer’s retirement, I wrote one myself. I typed that proclamation as one of the NUA’s newest volunteers, hungry to join others in collective action at the industry level. I knew already that reliance upon upstream…
-
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…
-
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 That’s how an old couch that’s made to last, but out of date, receives the same end-of-life treatment as a single-use couch made with glued together wood chips.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.
-
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…
-
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.
-
Furniture Rescue as the System’s Default
Can we *even* imagine a future when our system’s default was furniture RESCUE instead of DISPOSAL? How good would it feel to replace guilt with satisfaction, to know that curbside furniture was heading to its next phase of life, instead of getting buried forever in a greenhouse gas emitting, leachate producing, hole in the ground? Our current system “rescues” recyclables and food waste every day. Hundreds of millions of dollars of infrastructure exists to keep certain materials out of the landfill. This isn’t a matter of complexity, it’s one of political will, data, awareness and urgency. Earth day, week, month, etc. aka every damn day, is an excellent time to…
-
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?
