Vancouver Fall Home Show: Ikea keeps furniture out of the landfill

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Visitors to the Vancouver Fall Home Show will have an opportunity to learn about Ikea’s commitment to becoming a circular business by 2030 through sustainability and zero waste programs in which the company’s customers will play a key role.

Ikea wants to inspire people to live more sustainably through initiatives such as its Sell-Back Program, part of its People + Planet positive strategy, says Aideen Butler, Ikea Canada’s local marketing specialist.

The Sell-Back Program enables customers to apply to sell their gently used Ikea products back to the retailer in exchange for store credit. Ikea will, in turn, give the product a second life through resale or donation.

“This is one way we can connect customers with new ways to extend the life of their Ikea products,” says Aideen Butler, Ikea Canada’s local marketing specialist.

The service is a benefit of the Family loyalty program: home furnishings submitted through the Sell-Back Program are brought back to the store assembled – and sold assembled – at the stores’ Circular Hubs. The As-Is department in the company’s Coquitlam store has been repurposed to create the hub space while renovations for the Richmond store’s Circular Hub are in progress and scheduled for completion in the next few weeks.

In addition to the sales area of the Circular Hub, staff working on furniture for resale and any items that may have arrived at the store in need of attention or repackaging are visible to customers who will be able to see this aspect of Ikea’s commitment to circularity, says Butler.

In the first two months following the program’s soft launch in 2019, there were over 7,600 sell-back submissions at stores across Canada, she says. The program was paused due to the COVID-19 pandemic but is up and running again and has received more than 45,000 submissions since its launch.

By following the steps on the Ikea website, there should be no surprises in the return process. “We are trying to be as clear as possible to avoid any confusion,” says Butler. Upholstered furniture, oversized items or products that have been altered are not part of the program.

The categories for the Sell-Back Program include dressers, office drawer cabinets, shoe storage, sideboards, bookcases and shelf units, cabinets, dining tables and chairs, multimedia furniture and small tables. Since the program’s launch, the most popular sell-back categories have been chairs, stools, dressers and bookcases.

Customer response to the program has been positive, with many of the items being snapped up on the same day they were offered for sale, she says.

The booth at the show will display examples of products that have been received through the program, and that will be sold in the Circular Hubs at the Coquitlam and Richmond stores, says Butler.

The show will also give Ikea the opportunity to share other strategies that support the transition to circularity. In 2015 Ikea moved all its lighting products to LED, a change Butler estimates can save households up to 20 per cent of their energy costs, and in 2020 it phased out single-use plastics from its home furnishing range.

One way to identify Ikea’s sustainable merchandise is to look out for the green dot used to identify products made with circularity in mind – such as Toflund, a soft rug that is made from recycled plastic bottles.

Butler says to meet its 2030 goal of becoming a circular company, Ikea is reassessing every item it makes.

“It’s not possible to meet the demands of the 21st century and be a fully circular business by 2030 using 20th-century approaches,” she says.

This means transforming the current linear business model to a circular model and designing products that have re-use, repair, repurposing and recycling in mind from the beginning, she says.

This can be achieved by using only renewable, recycled and recyclable materials, eliminating waste from the supply chain, and introducing services like the Sell-Back Program.

Change is already underway, with the company currently using 60 per cent of renewable material and 10 per cent recycled material in its processes.

“It will impact some products in our range, but we know that 90 per cent of customers are looking for more sustainable choices,” she says.

One of Ikea’s other initiatives is helping people repair products through services such as the company’s spare parts library, where customers can source the parts they need to repair and prolong the life of their items. Announcements on workshops on a range of relevant subjects, such as how to fix small rips or tears in textiles, are shared through the Ikea Family loyalty program.

Ikea’s popular food items are also part of the circularity review. The company recently introduced the plant ball as a sustainable, vegetarian alternative to the traditional meatball. Made with pea protein, oats, potatoes, onion and apples, the new plant ball, sold in the Swedish Food Markets near the check outs, has only 4 per cent of the climate footprint of the traditional meatball.