IKEA Might Not Be So Sustainable After All
By Amisha Sharma
In a recent company report, IKEA went out of its way to tell potential customers that “sustainability is a part of [its] roots.” It nicely complements a good-spirited Saturday trip to your local store, where hordes of good-looking young families and thriving hipsters will surely accompany you on your trek through the patented maze of beautiful, DIY-ready and reasonably-priced furniture. Most of IKEA’s snazzy pieces are made of wood from all over the world, and IKEA has made a point of reassuring its international customers that its selections are both simple and eco-friendly.
But attention, cheerful shoppers: you may now have good reason to believe that your cute, cheap pine dining set was in fact fashioned from a 600-year-old protected rainforest.
Protests from various environmental groups over the past two years have served to expose IKEA’s practices in deforestation in Russia. IKEA’s forestry subsidiary, Swedwood, gained access in 2006 to 700,000 acres of one of Europe’s last great forests, found on the Russian-Finnish border, on the condition that it practiced sustainable logging practices. This meant steering clear of chopping down ancient trees and trees growing on steep slopes, while are classified as key biotopes essential for the health of the centuries-old ecosystem.
However, recent audits by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), a global environmentalist nonprofit, revealed the company’s major violations of these terms. Simon Counsell, the director of the Rainforest Foundation UK, said in a statement that IKEA has been felling 600-year old trees to construct its flat-pack (ready-to-assemble) furniture. Some groups have called the damage to the protected forests “massive,” albeit highly profitable for the company, which consumes 1% of the entire world’s wood supply each year.
In response to the adverse findings, the FSC suspended IKEA’s forestry certificate, a serious blow to the company’s reputation as a staunch advocate of sustainability. IKEA has since shut down its operations altogether in the Karelia region where its practices came under fire, raising cheers from environmentalist groups who have been battling this issue for about two years.
Without a certificate to hide behind, it seems the Swedish furniture giant may finally be held accountable for its environmental malpractices…not to mention in part causing this blasted polar vortex! After all, deforestation → climate change → harsher winters → too much snow in New York…okay, maybe this is a stretch. But I’m sure we can all agree that a guilt-free wooden dining set offers superior feng shui (or perhaps karmic bang for your buck) to that of IKEA’s alternative.
