If you live in Sydney, Australia, and want to get rid of an old Ikea chair or bookcase, you can take it back to your local Ikea store, which will buy it back from you and resell it to help it avoid ending up in a landfill. The program, along with programs for furniture leasing that the brand is expanding globally this year, is a part of of Ikea\u2019s broader strategy to become climate positive\u2014meaning it reduces more greenhouse gas emissions than its entire value chain creates\u2014in only a decade.<\/p>\n
Hitting the climate positive goal will mean transforming every part of the business, including the way it designs products, the energy used in suppliers\u2019 factories, and how customers use products that are often seen as disposable today. Those changes will have to happen quickly. \u201cI think their timing is very aggressive,\u201d says Mark Griffiths, the global leader of the Climate Business Hub at the nonprofit WWF, which is working with Ikea on its environmental strategy. \u201cIt\u2019s a decade away, and if you think about how big that company is, and how many suppliers they have, and what they need to do, it\u2019s a huge mountain to climb.\u201d<\/p>\n
In late 2019, the Inter Ikea Group, the company that controls the Ikea brand, announced that it was investing 200 million Euros to accelerate the move to become climate positive by 2030. The company recognizes that this level of transformation is necessary. \u201cThe ambitions and commitments are quite bold, but it\u2019s based on the science,\u201d says Lena Pripp Kovac, chief sustainability officer at the Inter Ikea Group. As with some other major companies, the Ingka Group, the company that controls Ikea retail stores, has a target to cut emissions in line with keeping global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius. (The corporate relationship between Ikea\u2019s various companies is complex, as this flowchart demonstrates, but the brand as a whole is moving toward the climate positive goal.) Few companies plan to move as quickly.<\/p>\n
The company\u2019s total annual carbon footprint in 2018 was 26.9 million metric tons, and involves everything from the ingredients used in the food served in stores to the fuel used to ship goods from factories. The energy that customers use at home to power Ikea products makes up more than 20% of the total footprint, so the company is working to make its energy-using products more efficient (and offering solar panels for sale in some stores to help customers switch to renewable energy). Customer trips to stores make up another 15% of the footprint, and some stores are now beginning to offer options like cargo bikes that customers can borrow to bring furniture home. Production, including the energy used at suppliers\u2019 factories, is another 11%. But the largest piece of the footprint, at 36.4%, comes from materials, making changing how the company makes its furniture a particularly important piece of the climate strategy.<\/p>\n
As the world\u2019s largest furniture retailer, with 9,000-plus different products for sale in each store, the company uses materials at a massive scale. In a year, to make every bookshelf and coffee table and dresser and all of the other wood and particleboard products it sells, for example, it uses around 18 million cubic meters of wood, enough to fill 7,200 Olympic-size swimming pools.<\/p>\n
The brand already sources most of its wood from FSC-certified forests; some wood comes from plantations, including locations in Slovakia where fast-growing poplar trees grow on partially degraded land where it would be harder to grow other crops. Other wood is sourced from sustainably managed forests. If it\u2019s grown and harvested in the right way, wood isn\u2019t a bad material choice, since it\u2019s renewable and takes up CO2 from the atmosphere as it grows. \u201cWood stores carbon as long as it\u2019s intact,\u201d says Rod Taylor, global director of the forests program at the nonprofit World Resources Institute. \u201cBut then the circular economy becomes really important, because if it\u2019s a cheap throwaway product\u2014like some of Ikea\u2019s products\u2014its half-life in storing carbon will be relatively short.\u201d<\/p>\n
There\u2019s also a limited amount of sustainably grown wood available and a finite amount of land to grow more. So even as the company works to ensure that it\u2019s getting wood from the right places, it\u2019s also starting to incorporate other, improved materials into its products\u2014one rug that looks like sheepskin, for example, is actually made from recycled plastic bottles\u2014and it\u2019s also rethinking its products more fundamentally, with the view that all Ikea products can themselves serve as raw materials in the future. \u201cDecoupling material use is important,\u201d says Kovac. \u201cWe know that if we\u2019re going to reach the [masses] . . . we need to be much more efficient in our supply chains and in our product design, as well as in the way we actually own products in the future.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ikea has analyzed all of its products to see how they can become circular, meaning that the materials can be reused in loops rather than ending up in landfills. The company\u2019s designers now look at how products can be designed for their expected lifespan, how they can be designed to minimize waste in production to later be adapted, upgraded, or repaired, and for easy disassembly and recycling. \u201cEvery product function needed to be assessed,\u201d says Kovac. \u201cA paper napkin has one circular profile, a toilet brush another, a sofa another. We got to know which product should be repurposed, which could be refurbished or recycled or reused, to make sure that we have those capabilities in the range of products that we have in the future.\u201d<\/p>\n
The company is making a range of other changes, from figuring out how to fit more products on trucks to moving to zero-emissions deliveries to customers. It stopped selling single-use plastic products on January 1, 2020. But some of the biggest changes are outside of its direct control. Part of the new 200 million euro investment will go to help suppliers move to renewable energy in production; the other part will support more responsible forest management and restoring degraded land (restoring forests can help absorb carbon, which will help Ikea reach the goal of being \u201cclimate positive\u201d and reduce more emissions than it creates). The brand will also have to convince consumers that it\u2019s worth taking the time to repair or return old products that they might have tossed on the curb in the past.<\/p>\n
\u201cOnce they\u2019ve sold the product and it\u2019s sitting in someone\u2019s home, how do you make sure that the product comes back to Ikea to be renewed, restored, or recycled after its first use?\u201d says Griffiths. \u201cHow do you convince the end consumer, a very important component of the whole value chain? It comes down to education, communication, and showing consumers that this is actually in their interest to do . . . it\u2019s cheaper, or they get a better experience.\u201d<\/p>\n
These changes, and encouraging suppliers to change, will likely be the most challenging part of the transition, he says. And though Ikea can have an impact on its own because of its size, it\u2019s also critical that other companies embark on similar paths. \u201cOne single company isn\u2019t going to get us there from a climate perspective,\u201d Griffiths says. Many others may not move as quickly; Griffiths says that H&M was interested in working on a similar timeline, but after it analyzed what was possible, decided to aim for the year 2040 instead. \u201cWhat we\u2019re saying to companies is go and do the math, and then let\u2019s work out how quickly you think you can do it,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd then let\u2019s get to work.\u201d<\/p>\n
Adele Peters<\/p>\n