Ikea’s ambitious plan to make its cheap furniture last forever

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Ikea shifted to flat-pack, self-assembly products in 1953 to minimize shipping costs and damage to mail-order deliveries. In 1970, the first self-service area was opened at Ikea’s flagship store near Stockholm, which allowed customers to walk out with flat-pack furniture in hand to assemble at home. The debut of Ikea’s first store outside of Scandinavia, in Switzerland, in 1973 set the stage for international expansion: Ikea is now the world’s largest home furnishings business, with nearly 530 stores (including test formats and planning studios) in more than 50 countries.

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

Sustainable forestry has long been a key focus of the brand, for good reason. Ikea uses wood in 60 percent of its products. Last year, it used just under 671 million cubic feet of wood (enough to fill 18 Empire State Buildings) in home furnishings and packaging, most of it from Poland, Russia, Belarus, Sweden, and Germany. About 12 percent of it was recycled and nearly all the rest was certified by the Forest Stewardship Council, a nonprofit group that promotes responsible forestry (Ikea is a founding member), meaning its harvesting did not contribute to deforestation.

Ikea still runs into criticism from time to time. Last year, the company was accused of illegally sourcing wood from Ukraine; a third-party independent investigation found no evidence of such timber in its supply chain, attributing the allegations to ambiguity surrounding the law concerning certain forest management practices. FSC is now working to resolve the issue.