It's moving season, and the City of Boston has launched a pilot program that aims to reduce the amount of furniture going to a landfill and help people in need furnish their homes -- all for free.
In Boston, about 70% of apartment leases turn over Sept. 1, according to the city, largely because of the number of students moving before the start of the school year.
"With that, we see a lot of residents leaving unwanted furniture on the curb and sometimes people pick it up and take it home," said Thaddeus Brown, program manager with the Mayor's Office of New Urban Mechanics, describing what is known locally as "Allston Christmas."
He said MONUM partnered with students from the Harvard Kennedy School to conduct research into furniture waste last summer and found a that much of the furniture left out on the street does not find a new home.
"They found that there were about 800 pieces of furniture that could have probably been reused, but was basically curbed to go to the trash," said Brown.
This year, the city is partnering with Household Goods, a furniture bank in Acton, Massachusetts, to pick up furniture for free in the Brighton neighborhood and donate it to people who are referred to the non-profit by social service agencies.
"Most of our clients are here under very difficult circumstances," said Kirsten Spargo, Director of Operations at Household Goods. "They might be veterans coming out of a homeless shelter, they might be a parent leaving a domestic violence situation, and they might be building their homes again from scratch."
Tuesday afternoon, furniture that was dropped off at Household Goods was quickly inspected and placed out on the showroom. Within minutes some pieces were already chosen by clients and loaded onto moving trucks, headed to their new homes. Spargo said the organization serves 3,000 families each year.
"We're really excited to have this opportunity. We're looking for the larger items of furniture that our clients otherwise wouldn't be able to get on their own," she said. "So we're looking at sofas, upholstered chairs, we're looking for dressers, kitchen tables, coffee tables, nightstands, the list goes on. It's those really large, good-quality items that we know are in the City of Boston area, that we haven't otherwise had the opportunity to get before."
Through this pilot program, Brighton residents can submit a request to have their furniture picked up for free by volunteers from the furniture bank on Monday, Aug. 25th. The deadline to submit a request is Friday, Aug. 22.
Brown says the goal is to learn from this pilot program how much furniture can be diverted from the landfill and what it would take to scale up a program like this so that more residents could participate in the future.
"We're hoping that residents in the city of Boston, especially in the area where we're conducting this pilot, feel like they have somewhere that their furniture can live on. Oftentimes people are trying to sell their furniture on Facebook Marketplace or even just give it away," said Brown. "And I think oftentimes people, by the time they get to the move-out period, they're like, 'Well, I don't know what to do with my furniture now, so I'm just going to curb it.' But through this collaboration with Household Goods, we're hoping that more people are aware of the different options they have, which one of them being donating into a furniture bank."
For more information on donating to Household Goods, visit its website.