Posts tagged ‘second-hand’
Reuse: Second-hand furniture
I love a good bit of second-hand furniture. My boss (sorta) does too – she collects antiques. She loves them for their beauty and history.
I don’t collect antiques, but I do buy second-hand furniture – partly (and originally) because it’s considerably cheaper, and I have never been a wealthy person. These days though, the low impact nature of using pre-loved furnishings is the main reason I do it.
Second-hand furniture - For the Win!
Reusing furniture is great for the environment. When using pre-loved furniture, you avoid pollution from the following sources:
- Deforestation, water use and land use to make wooden furniture
- Chemicals/smog, drilling and mining from making plastic furniture
- Strip mining to get the metal to make metal furniture
- Quarrying to get rock and sand for stone and glass furniture
- Water and land use for plant-based fabrics
- Water use, land use and pollution from animal-based fabrics
- Excess water use in any type of furniture production.
You can get second-hand furniture for free from Freecycle. Sometimes though, what you want isn’t there, so you have to go shopping. There are a bunch of different places you can go to find second-hand furniture.
Op shops (also known as thrift shops or consignment stores)
Op shops, like Lifeline, St Vinnies or the Salvation Army often have big stores which carry a variety of (mostly crappy) used furniture. If you wade through the crap though, you can usually find a gem hiding in a corner somewhere. I’ve gotten a desk chair, wicker phone table and a bedside table from op shops.
Second-hand furniture shops
Second-hand furniture shops tend to have stuff that is a bit nicer than op shops, but it’s also a bit more expensive. Look out particularly for the kind that sell ex-display home pieces. The furniture looks good, has been hardly used and is significantly cheaper than buying new! They’re located all over – you’ll just have to search for them. I’ve gotten a coffee table and my dining table and chairs from second-hand furniture shops.
TradingPost, Craigslist, TradeMe, ebay or similar sites/newspapers
Online and print classifieds listing items for sale, from computers to textbooks, not just furniture. That being said, you can get some really good deals here, and often from places close-by.
Garage sales, Skip Dipping (Dumpster Diving) and Kerbside Collections
Garage sales, like Freecycle give-aways, are an excellent local place to go to find second-hand furniture. As the furniture is fresh out of someone’s house, it’s usually in good nick ad you don’t have to pay the middle man. Kerbside collections occur here once every two years, during which time everyone puts their unwanted junk on the footpath. It’s perfectly acceptable to take stuff you see – we’ve gotten lamps and a fan. If you’re lucky, you live in Canberra and have Second-hand Sundays. Skip dipping or dumpster diving (often not actually involving diving) is another perfectly legitimate way to get good stuff. We got a big couch when we were living in the USA by doing just that (clearly it was too big to be actually in the dumpster, but it was beside it).
Friends, family and colleagues
Getting furniture from friends, family and colleagues is the best idea in my opinion. You know they’re not going to rip you off and normally their stuff is in good nick and you can trust it. I, for example, have two desks, two sets of drawers, two desk chairs, a microwave, a fridge, a washing machine, a bookshelf, some massive chests of drawers, lounge chairs galore and other bits and pieces from friends, family and colleagues. Some things I’ve bought and others I’ve been given. Most often, people offer when they’re emigrating out of the country, moving generally or just don’t have the space.
So give second-hand furniture a shot – save the environment and your wallet!
Reduce: Tissues vs Hankies
What has the greater environmental impact, tissues or handkerchiefs? This is a question that’s been niggling inside my mind for some time, ever since I found out that Naturale were no longer producing recycled tissues, leaving Australia with no recycled facial tissues on the market. (I emailed them to be sure – they’ve definitely stopped.)
This post on Super Eco got me thinking about it again. Can I best minimise my impact on the environment by reducing my use of tissues and changing over to handkerchiefs?
I thought I’d weight up the pros and cons:
- Tissues are made of paper, the production of which involves chopping down trees. This action releases lots of carbon into the atmosphere, and also removes the forests that are the carbon sinks of our world.
- Tissue production, like all paper production, includes the use of lots of water.
- Tissues are disposable, so more trees are cut down for every single tissue you use.
- Tissues come packaged in cardboard (the ubiquitous tissue box), which involves the destruction of more forestry as they’re manufactured.
- As you are constantly throwing them away, you need to buy more and more tissues. This involves transport costs as the tissues are shipped to the stores, and then from the store to your house. It all works something like food miles.
- The tissues you throw away don’t get recycled, they enter landfill – and we all know landfill is bad, bad, bad!
Seems pretty simple, doesn’t it. All that stuff that’s bad about tissues must be prevented by hankies… right? Hmm.
- Hankies are made with fabric, usually cotton, which is one of the most water-intensive crops to grow.
- The harvest of cotton is also an environmental hazard.
- Cotton needs loads of pesticides, and as well as the environmental impact of the pesticides, there’s the impact of the planes that dump the pesticides.
- Hankies have to be washed, which uses more water still.
So now you see my trouble, although listing it all out like that does seem to point in a particular direction.
Go hankies!
Everyone else on the net seems to also back this theory up. Don’t ask me why it never occurred to me to Google this before. Yeah, I said shuddup. Yes, Jho… you. 
Here are some great reads about why hankies are the winners over tissues:
- Use a Handkerchief Instead of Facial Tissues over at Planet Green
- Wipe Responsibly in 2006! at Treehugger
- Kleenex Kleercut – Trees for Tissues, also at Treehugger
- Kleercut – wiping away ancient forests, at the official Kleercut site, sponsored by Greenpeace
- Facial Tissues vs Hankies at WasteWearDaily
- Tissues vs Hankies – Gesundheit! at Tiny Choices
- Time for a little hanky-panky! at enviromom
- Handkerchiefs vs Recycled Tissues in the Battle Against Endless Toddler Mucous at The Green Baby Guide
Now I just have to get me some hankies! I’d like to make some, but I’ll have to get second hand fabric, or I’ll end up buying more material than I need. I wonder if flannel hankies would be even softer, for when you’ve got a cold? They sell large bags of flannel off-cuts for $6 each at Bunnings. But aside from flannel, where will I get some pretty second-hand fabric?
On a non-environmental note, I find it weird that I feel the hankies need to be pretty and girly. I wouldn’t call myself butch, certainly, but I’m not on the femme side of the lady spectrum. I wouldn’t wear floral or pink if you paid me (ok, maybe if you paid me). I don’t shave my legs or even own make-up. I like little pretty things though, they make me feel good, and girly in secret. My cloth pantyliners, the liner of my cargo pants and work trousers, Yankee Elv’s home-made earrings all have that effect. Anyway, pretty second-hand fabric must be available – my cloth pantyliners are very pretty, and Laura over at Amy’s Rag Bag only uses second-hand cloth.
Cloth panyliners from Amy's Rag Bag
Suggestions people? And does anyone have a hankie pattern? I don’t know if I can manage a hemmed square all by myself. 
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