The more we learn about this Swedish company, the more we like it. It's a leading light in recycling and carbon neutrality.
IKEA now produces more energy than it consumes and the Swedish furniture retail giant has recently introduced an initiative to buy back customers' unwanted IKEA products for up to half of the original price, and their latest move is the purchase of 11,000 acres of forest in Georgia that looked like it would be lost to development.
To ensure it remains intact and working to suck up CO2 from the atmosphere, the forest was bought by IKEA as part of a strategy to reduce more carbon than it creates through its value chain.
Home to the valuable gopher tortoise, the working forest in the Altamaha Basin is now owned by the IKEA subsidiary, Ingka Group, which has worked with The Conservation Fund, a non-profit that has protected over 8-million acres of forests in the U.S. from fragmentation and development.
A working forest is one in which lumber is harvested and regrown - and it’s these forests which often suffer from being broken up into smaller segments and developed, something the Conservation Fund and IKEA are ensuring will not happen by creating permanent easements that legally prevent the forest from ever being split up into smaller pieces.
And, these actions will, in turn, protect the gopher tortoise - a priority species for conservation.
“Well-managed forests provide essential benefits, including clean water and important wildlife habitat, as well as mitigating climate change,” said Larry Selzer, President and CEO of The Conservation Fund.
Forest stewardship is just one way that the world’s largest furniture outlet is trying to become a carbon-neutral company.
IKEA now produces more energy than it consumes. Ultimately, it plans to be climate-positive by 2030. It’s one thing to design an energy positive house and another to create an energy positive superstore. How about an energy positive global retail business? That sounds near-impossible, right? Well, Swedish flat-pack furniture giant IKEA is now, remarkably, achieving just that. More...