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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,…
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LFL Lives On through Furniturecycle
It’s time to call it what it is. A crisis. Over the last year while posting hundreds of photos of beautifully imperfect pieces of furniture on Instagram, I’ve asked this question many times–is this a crisis? Who says, and when? Will the waste industry tell us? No. The furniture industry? No. So, I’m doing it–I’m declaring a crisis. The data is too staggering not to. Loved Furniture Lasts, my accidental passion project that documented over 50,000 pounds of discarded furniture within two miles of my home in 15 months, of which 89% was reusable, is evolving. I’m pleased to introduce Furniturecycle, an Idea Lab that explores furniture waste from the…
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Circularity in Furnishings
It was an honor to present Circularity in Furnishings, a story about my passion project, Loved Furniture Lasts, to the Sustainable Furnishings Council on May 21, 2020 as part of their Sustainability Essentials Webinar series. Summary findings: In 15 months, from Jan. 2019-Mar. 2020, within two miles of my home, I chronicled 592 pieces of discarded furniture. Added together, it weighed an estimated 50,578 pounds. Since weight in and of itself is not super useful, I graded them by condition and found 89% was reusable. Takeaway thoughts: This is not a waste problem, this is a lack of investment, infrastructure and imagination In a circular economy, downstream is the new…
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Wildness for the Weary
We’ve been watching “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea” documentary by Ken Burns. It was kind of a random selection and kind of a balm since our road trip to the Southwest to camp under the stars, last week, was cancelled, due to COVID. Wildness is a word that came up a lot in the first episode. Wildness. Wildness. I loved it. It stirred something in me. It reminded me of my own journey, which started forever ago as a young student in a new program, Environmental Studies, at a big university in a city shrouded in pollution. A university that didn’t celebrate Earth Day for the first couple of…
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A Chest Curbed by COVID Closures
As I knelt to capture this picture, I heard a voice over my left shoulder. A woman, dressed in full scrubs, hair net and face mask, which was pulled down, stood on the far side of her car that was parked at the curb directly behind me. She asked, “You like it?” I say that I do, as I turned around to face her. “It’s a brand new chest from Wayfair. We got it for my mom, but we had to lower her bed because the mattress was too high. It didn’t fit.“ She went on to explain how they took a load of things to Salvation Army but that…
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Whisking our Worries Away with our Trash
We’re so conditioned. This treatment of resources is encouraged by our profit seeking systems. It’s become normalized behavior to see precious resources packaged into goods, full of embodied energy, carbon, and labor, piled up on the street and not flinch. People may walk by and sniff it out to see if anything is worth saving, but that’s an imperfect solution and things degrade quickly when they’re left on the street, even when set out in perfect condition. This system says materials are more valuable as garbage than keeping them in and moving them through our local economy. Who benefits from this practice? In whose interest is it for us to…
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Love What Gives You Air
Precious trees. You spoil us with shade, natural air conditioning, water filtration and retention, oxygen, carbon sequestration, habitat, sound absorption and calming beauty. Your incredible functions make life on this planet possible, and you provide all of these benefits, free of charge. Our reliance on you doesn’t stop once you’re felled. Your wood, the natural resource you grew while freely giving us air to breathe, is an incredible and beautiful material from which we build our homes, our fences, and our furniture. These meaningful, long term investments can stand the test of time because of your material quality. Though wooden products can last for generations, humans are operating on ever…
