This Saturday I will move to a new home. As always before moving, I enjoy myself designing multiple ways to furnish my new 18 m2 room. All of a sudden I have the desire for a new color palette, for new furniture and a new atmosphere I want to create. Already, I decided that 5 of my 7 main pieces of furniture no longer deserve a spot in my room. Inspired by pinterest.com [1] I dream about the new furniture I want to buy and the refreshing atmosphere I wish to create.
At the same time my style of decoration changes fast, giving me desires for ‘totally different furniture’ every time I move. Hence, the furniture that enters this week, has a large chance of being disposed of in a few years from now. Striving for a sustainable lifestyle, this causes a dilemma:
How I can allow myself to change my furniture every few years, while living a sustainable lifestyle?
The website duurzaamthuis.nl provides two solutions for this challenge [1]:
1) Buy new products made of natural or recyclable materials with a low ecological footprint
2) Buy second hand products
To both strategies I want to add the idea of offering your old furniture as second hand products to a new owner. This gives other people the same opportunity to purchase sustainable furniture, while you are ensured that your furniture is having a second (or third, fourth, fifth) life. I know what you’re thinking; ‘people buy second hand because it is cheap’. That’s often true, and it doesn’t change my argument, because your furniture still receives a second life.
In the Netherlands we have a brilliant website called Marktplaats [2] where you can sell and buy your stuff to other people. Within Delft, the Facebook page ‘Student Sale’ [3] works even faster, due to the huge amount of international students who are looking for furniture, clothing, kitchen utensils and study books.
My strategy will be to sell my furniture on Student Sale and buy new ones on Marktplaats, avoiding the purchase of any new products. This provides me with flexible and low-priced room decoration, suiting my sustainable lifestyle.
[1] https://www.pinterest.com/, accessed at January 4th, 2016
[2] www.duurzaamthuis.nl/duurzaam-wonen/interieur, accessed at January 4th, 2016
[3] http://www.marktplaats.nl/, accessed at January 4th, 2016
[4] https://www.facebook.com/groups/student.sale/, accessed at January 4th, 2016