Inside Ikea’s Ambitious Plan To Make Cheap Furniture Last Forever

(Illustration: Rebecca Zisser/Huffpost; Photos: Getty, Ikea)
The Ikea store in Queens, New York, which opened on Jan. 14, marked a determined departure for the iconic home furnishings brand. Located in the Rego Park SHOPPING MALL, the 11,500-square-foot open layout-a latest, small format for Ikea-is split into core areas of the house, offering small-space alternatives tailored to city living. Rooms happen to be thoughtfully merchandised with conveniently portable accessories like lamps and toss pillows that customers can take with them on the bus or subway, both which certainly are a block away-a key factor in deciding on the store’s location, given that more than half of city residents make use of public transportation.

Digital stations allow buyers to self-fork out and arrange household furniture delivery for bigger bits for a flat fee of $49. The company is working to generate all last-mile deliveries in New York City by electric car or truck, regarding to Jennifer Keesson, country sustainability supervisor for Ikea U.S.-a test operate on the way to making the previous mile of its more than 2 million annual home deliveries nationwide zero emissions by 2025. 

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Ikea’s overarching goal is normally to be “climate positive” by 2030-reducing extra greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) than its whole value chain emits. It plans to get this done while still growing its organization by designing services, moving into new market segments and building dozens, certainly hundreds, of new retailers in that time. The business is charging ahead with plans to wide open 50 more stores (of various sizes and forms) in 2021 by itself. The Swedish powerhouse set out 80 years ago “to create a much better everyday life for the countless people”-as its motto goes-by putting sleek, stylish furniture within the budgets of the masses, and became a $35.4 billion (2020 revenues) market force along the way. And only as the manufacturer is widely credited with democratizing style, it’s now moving to create sustainable living typical instead of the exception, with a sprawling approach that’s wildly ambitious in scope.

“An increasing amount of companies have said they’ll be climate confident by 2040 or 2050, but relatively few have said 2030.”
Expanding its retail footprint upon a warming planet might seem to be to fly directly when confronted with Ikea’s plan to decrease its colossal environment footprint. Within the last year, movements to diminish energy use over the business, from manufacturing from what it acts in its eating places, have reduced its weather footprint per merchandise sold by 7%, the business estimates. Meeting its 2030 target while selling a lot more will mean reducing the common climate footprint per merchandise by 70%.

Considering that Ikea emitted the equivalent of 24.9 million a great deal of carbon dioxide in 2019-accounting for 0.1% of the world’s GHG emissions that year-it’s a Herculean undertaking that encompasses practically every element of its organization, from the products it sources through item manufacturing and transfer. Emissions reductions may also result from efforts to draw carbon out from the atmosphere (without the utilization of carbon offsets) and affect supplier and customer habit. 

Making products last longer, and giving old goods second lives, is a central pillar of its climate ambitions: Ikea aims to become a “100% circular business” by 2030. Which means creating home merchandise that not merely meet Ikea’s definition of “democratic design”-cost-effective, high-top quality, sustainable, stylish and functional-but also can come to be reused, refurbished, recycled or remanufactured into new items.

Products contribute the most to Ikea’s overall environment footprint, followed by the utilization of products in buyer homes. Squeezing carbon cost savings out of these budgets poses the greatest hurdles toward getting together with its ambitious targets, which were established to align with the Paris weather accord target of keeping global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. 

“An increasing quantity of companies have said they’ll be climate great by 2040 or 2050, but comparatively few have said 2030,” said Andrew Winston, a corporate sustainability strategist and writer of “The Big Pivot.” “Ikea’s challenge can be much more complicated because they manufacture a great deal of different products-contrary to a provider like Google, which has also set amazingly aggressive goals.”

The sprawling infrastructure and commercial leverage that permits the company to produce and sell an incredible number of products is specifically what Ikea is banking to understand its climate goals.

“Obviously the consumption style of the 1900s that we were part of won't work in the foreseeable future, because we’re consuming more than the planet can offer,” said Ingka Group CEO Jesper Brodin along a Harvard Business Review podcast last December. Ingka Group is the major of 12 strategic partners in Ikea’s franchise program, operating 380 Ikea stores around the world.

“I love mass development,” said Brodin, “because if you set it in the right aspect, you can scale up change so much better and faster. When you can scale something that’s climate-confident, that’s probably the greatest and fastest way of doing it-and carry the price down hence sustainability doesn’t turn into something that’s only for those who are able it.”

Seeing the Forest designed for the Trees
Arguably few companies, particularly in the retail industry, have Ikea’s vision and knack for innovation. Founded in 1943 by the late Ingvar Kamprad-the name means of his initials, his spouse and children farm (Elmtaryd), and his birthplace (Agunnaryd)-it quickly became referred to for low prices. Chagrined competitors tried to pressure suppliers to boycott the manufacturer, driving Kamprad to start out designing products in-home and thinking early about moving beyond his market.

Ikea shifted to flat-pack, self-assembly products found in 1953 to reduce shipping costs and damage to mail-purchase deliveries. In 1970, the first self-service spot was opened up at Ikea’s flagship store near Stockholm, which allowed consumers to walk out with flat-pack home furniture at hand to assemble in the home. The debut of Ikea’s first store outside of Scandinavia, in Switzerland, in 1973 set the level for international expansion: Ikea is currently the world’s largest furniture business, with nearly 530 stores (including test formats and organizing studios) in a lot more than 50 countries.

The seeds of Ikea’s shift to sustainability were planted (literally) in 1998, with the start of the “Sow a Seed” Basis, which sought to rehabilitate large swaths of rainforest lost to logging and forest fires in Malaysian Borneo. Over the next 2 decades, Ikea funded the replanting of 3 million trees across 31,000 now-secured acres of rainforest. 

Sustainable forestry has long been a key concentration of the brand, once and for all reason. Ikea uses lumber in 60% of its products. This past year, it used just under 671 million cubic feet of wood (more than enough to fill 18 Empire State Properties) in furniture and packaging, almost all of it from Poland, Russia, Belarus, Sweden and Germany. About 12% of it had been recycled and practically all the rest was authorized by the Forest Stewardship Council, a nonprofit group that promotes accountable forestry (Ikea is normally a founding member), meaning its harvesting didn't donate to deforestation.

Ikea still incurs criticism from time to time. Last year, the business was accused of illegally sourcing hardwood from Ukraine; a third-get together independent investigation found no proof such timber in its source chain, attributing the allegations to ambiguity surrounding regulations concerning certain forest administration practices. FSC is now doing work to resolve the problem.

Wood as a learning resource is under danger from deforestation, wildfires, pests and other climate switch impacts. The brand’s commitment to sustainable forest administration is intended to ensure that its most significant raw materials remains in enough supply. It also aims to enhance biodiversity, support those whose livelihoods are forest-dependent and protect vital carbon-sequestering trees. A big chunk of the company’s emissions reductions rely on keeping carbon locked up in the crops and soils of healthful forests.

To that end, Ikea invests heavily in forestland, where the company may reap carefully managed timber. Earlier this month, Ingka Group declared its acquisition of practically 11,000 forested acres in southeast Georgia from The Conservation Fund, assuming its legally binding obligations to protect the area from fragmentation, restore trees and protect wildlife. The business now owns 136,000 acres of forest across five states, plus some 613,000 acres combined in the U.S. and Europe.

Material Change
“70 % of our footprint comes from products,” said Pia Heidenmark Make, Ingka Group’s chief sustainability officer. “Therefore the products we placed on the market, the products we choose and where we source them from are critical.”

Ikea is taking a close look in its entire source chain, said Make, with the purpose of only using recycled or renewable materials (like sustainably sourced timber and cotton) found in its over 9,500 products by 2030. Today 10% of goods contain recycled material, such as plastic material and polyester, and 60% contain renewable materials.

The company has up to now mapped out how exactly to achieve half its elements footprint reduction goals for 2030 and has to figure out ways to get all of those other way there.

In the December podcast, Brodin called recycleables the most challenging part of the sustainability equation, noting that components R&D has been among the brand’s top investment priorities for practically a decade.

“In terms of material innovation, nearly all expense is connected to your sustainability agenda-to find innovative materials that have a smaller climate or water footprint than what we work with today,” said Cook.

Laminated veneer lumber (LVL) is one materials showing promise. A relatively new engineered merchandise, it comprises multiple thin layers of solid wood glued together and significantly reduces wood intake by up to 40%. Its durability is related to metal in a few applications, rendering it a potentially practical substitute for steel and aluminum, which have a higher climate footprint due to their energy-intensive production process.

Another project explores using rice straw-a harvesting residue that’s typically burned and contributes to air pollution in places like northern India-as a fresh renewable material source.

Ikea in addition has partnered with clothing store H&M and forest goods supplier Stora Enso to purchase Tree To Textile, a good company that transforms lumber cellulose right into a sustainable textile fiber that may potentially serve instead of cotton, Ikea’s second-most-used natural material behind wood. This past year, the manufacturer used nearly 142,000 tons of the water-intensive crop-0.5% of cotton development worldwide.

So far, alternative materials remain in assessment phases or limited work with. Ikea’s rice-straw merchandise prototypes debuted as the FÖRÄNDRING (“transformation” in Swedish) assortment of rugs, bowls and baskets at retailers in India this past year, with limited volumes in a few European marketplaces.

Should the company decide these new products are viable, it will require years to update designs, adapt source chains and bring development to scale. But the good thing about Ikea’s size and clout implies that if the company does discover any breakthrough renewable components, it might push suppliers to can get on board.

“Ikea is fairly unique in its ability to tell a potential distributor, ‘If you can’t encounter our terms, we’ll find someone else who will,'” said Tom Eggert, a senior lecturer on business sustainability at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Whether it’s a wood alternative or plant-based plastics or another thing totally, they have the investing in power to create a market where one may well not yet exist.”

While cheap sofas and tables will be the company’s bread and butter, the brand is probably the world’s largest food retailers: 680 million buyers visited its food outlets in 2019. It offers a billion of its signature Swedish meatballs a 12 months.

But meat is an ecological nightmare-livestock development accounts for a lot more than 14% of total global greenhouse emissions and is a respected cause of deforestation. So Ikea is definitely retooling its menu. The business has sold over 5 million veggie hot pet dogs since unveiling them in 2018. Last August, it released the HUVUDROLL plant ball, an alternative solution to its iconic meatball. With substances like pea protein and potatoes, it mimics meat’s taste and texture (unlike the brand’s veggie balls, which debuted in 2015), with a environment footprint that’s only 4% of the beef-and-pork unique.

The company aims to create 50% of its restaurant entrees plant-based by 2025, and 80% of these non-red meat (of animals raised for food, cows and pigs will be the biggest GHG contributors). The brand’s packaged food may also be 80% plant-established within five years.

Ikea’s other not-so-small side hustle is helping eliminate fossil fuels from its retail businesses and production: The business is striving for 100% renewable energy across its entire value chain by 2030-including helping secure 100% renewable electricity because of its practically 1,600 suppliers. Ikea has been buying solutions like solar and wind farms all over the world since 2009. Its clean strength portfolio now includes 547 wind generators and two solar farms in 14 countries, and more than 920,000 solar panels on the roofs of Ikea retailers and warehouses.

Previous year, for the very first time, Ingka Group made more renewable energy-by a third-than it consumed globally on retail and distribution functions. 
Source: https://www.motherjones.com

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