Ikea is a worldwide company founded in Sweden, specializing in the design and sale of ready-to-assemble furniture, home goods, and related services. With 480 Ikea stores operating in 63 countries, the brand is best known for its modern furniture designs, minimalist aesthetics, and engaging shopping experience—highlighted by fully furnished room displays in expansive stores where customers can interact with items firsthand. Ikea is also famous for prioritizing cost-efficiency and continuous innovation in its product offerings, especially in its ready-to-assemble furniture sales model, but at what cost?
Wood for Ikea furniture is sourced from some of Europe’s last surviving old-growth forests. According to Greenpeace International (2024), “Several manufacturers were found to be sourcing wood from high conservation value forests. Based on publicly available information, IKEA is the biggest customer of products manufactured by most of those companies, implying a high likelihood that the problematic wood is ending up in IKEA furniture.”. Through official records and site visits, the researchers documented more than 50 potential forestry law infractions and bad management practices. These included deforestation by loggers’ use of tractor roads, extensive cutting without environmental studies, and the destruction of biodiverse woods. Recent enquiries into Ikea’s sourcing of wood from ecologically fragile regions in Romania’s Carpathian Mountains have been carried out independently by Greenpeace, Agent Green, and the Bruno Manser Fonds (BMF). According to both studies, Ikea’s practices run counter to its stated commitments to sustainability.
According to Ikea’s official website they state “… it’s an excellent material from a design, quality, and environmental perspective, as long as it’s responsibly sourced. Wood is durable, renewable, recyclable, and beautiful.”. Many similar statements are used on the website page but no mention of the locations where they source the wood. As of late, Ikea has paired up with World Wildlife Fund (WWF) after the controversy surrounding the logging sites. Although it is a step in the right direction, it still isn’t enough to cover up the scandals beneath the surface. “We decided many years ago to work with the highest available standards in the industry for improving responsible forest management around the world.” (Ikea 2024). This quote demonstrates the vagueness of dates and what kind of management is being used in their business practices.
Paraphrasing from the academic book, Forests and Globalization: Challenges and Opportunities for Sustainable Development, edited by William Nikolakis, and John L. Innes (2014) One of the most crucial raw resources for Ikea is wood. In terms of volume, it is by far the greatest raw material. Wood has qualities that make it an extremely practical option for Ikea home furnishings. An operation that is linked upstream to logs is by its by nature a diverging portion of the value chain, essentially creating value through sorting and cutting. By-products, materials sold to other customers, and materials used in Ikea solid wood goods are all distinguished. Many different players see forests as places of cultural belonging, biodiversity, carbon storage, food, fuel, medicine, fibre, lumber, and spirituality, which is why protecting the land is important. As a ploy for brands to look like they care, these conglomerate brands use greenwashing. It examines the increasing recognition of brand companies of their environmental impact, with a focus on the importance of their recent response and pledges to reduce their forest footprint and attain zero net deforestation throughout their worldwide supply chains, while still using cost cutting measures that are deemed unsustainable. The companies want people to buy in and think they are doing a good deed by purchasing merchandise from a large company who have slapped “sustainable” on their brand.
In conclusion, Ikea is the world’s biggest wood consumer. Despite their claims of sustainable sourcing, research showed that a large portion of the wood they use comes from areas like Ukraine, where illicit logging has been connected to their supply chain, and other places with subpar forest management techniques. Ikea regularly supports its claims of sustainable sourcing with Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) accreditation. Nonetheless, the FSC has come under fire for its inadequate control and disregard for unlawful deforestation in nations like Belarus and Ukraine. This begs the question of whether IKEA’s lumber source is truly environmentally friendly. Although the corporation has made significant progress in sustainable practices, it is challenging to regard them as genuinely environmentally friendly given their massive resource use, particularly in the area of timber. Their lofty promises and aspirations can seem more like abstract goals than practical action.
Bibliography
Greenpeace International. 2024. “IKEA Furniture Destroys Some of Europe’s Last Remaining Ancient Forests.” Greenpeace International. April 10, 2024. https://www.greenpeace.org/international/press-release/66349/ikea-furniture-destroys-some-of-europes-last-remaining-ancient-forests/.
IKEA. 2019. “A Sustainable Everyday.” Ikea.com. 2019. https://www.ikea.com/ca/en/this-is-ikea/sustainable-everyday/.
IKEA. 2024. “How We Work – IKEA Global.” IKEA. May 27, 2024. https://www.ikea.com/global/en/our-business/how-we-work/.
Lehren, Andrew W. , Dan De Luce, and Anna Schecter. 2021. “Ikea Kids’ Furniture May Be Tied to Illegal Russian Logging, Report Says.” NBC News. 2021. https://www.nbcnews.com/science/environment/ikea-likely-sold-furniture-linked-illegal-logging-forests-crucial-earth-n1273745.
Nikolaki, William, and John L. Innes , eds. 2017. “Forests and Globalization: Challenges and Opportunities for Sustainable Development.” Taylor & Francis Group. Routledge. June 16, 2017. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781315766539-6/voluntary-zero-net-deforestation-jane-lister-peter-dauvergneTay.
Shaw, Alex. 2024. “IKEA Blamed for Romanian Forest Destruction.” Mongabay Environmental News. April 25, 2024. https://news.mongabay.com/2024/04/ikea-blamed-for-romanian-forest-destruction/.
Victoria Warner
As a university student, IKEA is the face of luxury at an affordable price. However, many consumers do not investigate the environmental aspects of Ikeas production. Mikaela does an excellent job of using scholarly sources to back up her research. By identifying where Ikea gets the wood to make their products and the environmental restrictions in those areas, we can see Ikea is not following their sustainability promise. Most people see the sustainability promise on Ikeas brand, and instantly assume it is real. Through this paper, we see that Ikea is contributing to deforestation and the supply chain issues in different countries. However, the actual ad presented above is completely forgotten. The ad is for a sheet set, not a wooden bed frame. While we can assume the bed in the luxurious looking ad is from Ikea, that is not the point. The ad is designed to make Ikea look like a high-end brand, through the minimalist style of the bedroom and the sophisticated women. The woman is dressed in a silk drapey fabric, highlighting her class and wealth. She is meant to appear expensive, which is a contrast to the affordable Ikea sheets she is caressing. There is no correlation between the ad and the analysis, besides the mention of the brand itself.