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 a living wage—felt like such a victory.

Now, in 2021, I had the unexpected honor to find myself on the virtual stage with esteemed industry professionals. I was there to share what I learned after a year spent cataloguing street furniture in my neighborhood and ask what comes next.

How will we address the millions of tons of imperfect street furniture in an extractive economy that undervalues labor and overvalues disposables while meeting our zero waste, climate reduction, and equity goals?

That’s the ultimate question, in my mind. As I said yesterday, I think used, unwanted, imperfect furniture can catalyze local transformational change, but only if we stop treating it like a waste problem.