The Landfill Issue: part one

A friend, Alfred Neiderman, and I have been looking into the amount of furniture that is thrown away into landfills each year. It was something I started researching a little over a year ago when I was gathering facts for an informational DVD on what is “sustainable furniture”. As I get more information I will post it here.

I live in a pretty green minded community yet I learned from a friend of mine, who ran the local 1-800-Got Junk franchise that 8 to 13 sofas went into our landfill each day it was open. That number really blew my mind. Wow! Then I started to mathematically expand the information to figure out what that meant in all of the U.S. The estimated number of sofas that get dumped into landfills in the U.S. each year is 3,927,271. Now if that is not horrible enough let me reiterate: This is only the number of sofas tossed. It does not count chairs, desks or cabinets.

I have mentioned before, in other blog entries, that there are a lot of chemicals that are showing up in our ground water. This number contributes to that problem. There are other facets to this. Why are so many sofas going to the dump? 1) There are many that are so poorly made that they can not be fixed. They are junk. 2) There are accidents, such as cats peeing on the furniture or floods/hurricanes, that make the piece unusable. 3) There are people that get tired of their stuff and simply toss it. Many reasons and I have only listed the highlights. I think number one and three are the most frequent. Basically this is not only wasteful but not really healthy for us or our environment.

There is more to this. We are continuing our research to nail down the statistics. The strange thing is that, as far as I know, we are basically the only people really looking at this in terms of the United States. England is looking into it and there are some isolated municipalities that are concerned with their own dumped furniture numbers. We need to ask ourselves: 1) How much money are we wasting by buying throw away goods? 2) How is it impacting our local and world environment? 3) How is it impacting our country’s economy by buying throw away goods and where are those items made?

If you have answers to any of these questions or comments, please jump into the conversation.