IKEA invests 200M euro to become climate positive by 2030 | Hacker News Reader

IKEA invests 200M euro to become climate positive by 2030

newsroom.inter.ikea.com

Ikea: now that we have carved up the budget, how can we disseminate the message so that it makes a) employees feel good and b) ensure customers believe we are doing our best. Ideally how are we going to deflect from all our past and ongoing crimes[0][1][2][3]?

Sven Samenström: Oh I know, we just say it's to combat climate change and put a timeline on it so far into the future that nobody will remember this PR piece, and nobody will hold us accountable.

Talk is cheap!

[0] Spies and Racism at Ikea? https://abcnews.go.com/International/ikea-fire-book-executiv...

[1] How Ikea And Harvard Got Tangled In A Corrupt Romanian Land Deal https://www.huffpost.com/entry/harvard-ikea-corruption-roman...

[2] Swedish group IKEA starts exploiting its forests in Romania https://www.romania-insider.com/swedish-group-ikea-starts-ex...

[3] IKEA’s Flat-Pack Tax Scheme: a Corporate Structure Designed to Facilitate Profit-shifting and Tax Avoidance https://medium.com/@jurgeng/ikeas-tax-scheme-a-corporate-str...

I thought I was cynical, but this is exactly how I see it. Biggest corporations pay no or near to nothing taxes and then they give a small handouts to communities and we suppose to kiss their feet for being so generous.

Same happened with starbucks recently where they offer to supplement budget with once off donation instead of paying their fair share.

The biggest corporations pay lots of "taxes".

It's interesting how corporations "aren't people" until taxes come up :)

> The biggest corporations pay lots of "taxes".

what does putting taxes in quotation marks signify here? do you think they pay taxes under some other name?

> It's interesting how corporations "aren't people" until taxes come up :)

what's the argument here? are you saying that only natural people should be taxed?

Ikea is in the middle of fitting solar panels onto the roofs of their global stores. Turns out they have a lot of space up there, and have over a million panels worldwide.

They are also investing really heavily in wind farms and large one-off turbines - 3 billion dollars invested in the last 8 years. They own more turbines than they have stores, and are working with a bunch of interesting startups to develop tools to manage this fleet of disparate turbines (source: interviewed at one).

So yeah, I guess talk on the internet is cheap.

In Germany, we have come to call this the renaissance of the Sale of Indulgences. It's a very good analogy.

Heck, look at this crap: https://www.lufthansa.com/us/en/carbon-offsetting

Lufthansa is allowing you to pay to offset the carbon footprint of your flight. That's some next level delusion.

It's a form of greenwashing [1] and unfortunately very effective. If you spend enough money on advertising, showing your company in an environmentally friendly light, most consumers will simply accept it and lift your company above any other.

The only way to really combat this in a sustainable way would be forcing the internalisation of all external costs. But most companies would never let that happen. We need a strong political party which is willing to cut through all this greenwashing and enforce a better use of our limited resources or at least make it cost them.

But in all honestly, I don't see that coming any time soon.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwashing

Here is what I would like from IKEA if they truly want to embrace the climate.

I would like them to move towards durable quality furniture that last 100 years instead of furniture as a fashion business where you redecorate every season.

I would like them to stop creating mazes designed to maximize impulse purchasing.

Or you can work with what exists and make a beneficial improvement to the world

if all that exists is systemically broken and misaligned with the well being of sentient life, then you've just committed yourself to ruin.

IKEA furniture is durable and has a decent second hand marketplace on ebay, gumtree etc.

Can you provide some examples? Currently sold furniture is basically junk made from paper. It would not stand 2nd or 3rd relocation. Heck, it gets broken during first assembly!

Old second hand pieces are good quality, but one needs to look for at least decade old things. They were made from wood back then.

what you would like is for the profit motive to stop being the dominant force on this planet. that is an extremely tall order. "IKEA" as an agent in the world, despite being acted out by relatable individual human beings, is actually a mindless beast.

In Sweden, the land of a billion trees, Ikea wooden spoons are made in China and transported to Sweden. ANY company that does this and claims to be green is blowing smoke up your ass.

Wouldn't they be transported around the world? Surely IKEA doesn't manufacture abroad, bring everything to Sweden, and then ship out from there! Perhaps China is a reasonably central point to transport from?

Oďd, it seems like most of their stuff I buy is from eastern Europe, especially Poland.

Transport on the ocean has a relatively low carbon impact per kg. Spoons are small. It might actually be more efficient to build just one factory that can make spoons for IKEAs store across the world, rather than build a bunch of small local factories all over the place. Don't make assumptions.

Admirable - considering the size of IKEA as a business this can only be a good thing. Hopefully they reach carbon neutral sooner than 2030 before pushing on to carbon positive. My only concern is that planting trees isn't necessarily accurate measured as a carbon sink, with the amount of carbon captured often overestimated. However to reiterate, this can only be a good thing.

There's a lot of talk about planting trees now with TeamTrees and other similar things. I'm wondering what we will do with all the trees then when they have stopped growing and thus mostly stop sequestering CO₂. Trees don't live forever and when they die and rot, they will release the CO₂ back.

We could build things out of the trees and those would last maybe 50 to 100 years more. Or we could encase them in concrete and bury them to prevent rotting. But I don't really know a good solution and I was wondering what people have already thought of it. Or is the plan that we will come up with a solution to that in the next 50 years when the trees grow?

What if we focus on planting trees that are expected to live for hundreds of years and just hope we have better technology to cope with the situation once we’ve stopped burning every lump of coal we can find.

Growing them to restore grazing or otherwise degraded land works, though.

Hmm so when a forest grows, it sequesters a certain amount. When the trees start dying, they will start releasing it. But when the trees die, new trees will start growing in their stead and sequester the CO₂ released from the dying trees. Is the point to capture CO₂ into these cycles? So as only part of the trees are dying at any given stage, only a part of the CO₂ is "available" in the air at any given moment.

Is that how it works?

I believe that IKEA is climate negative by design: it's H&M / Primark of furniture world. Because just like fast fashion, fast furniture encourages extreme levels of production and consumption of short-lasting goods, which are later often thrown away, rather than being resold and reused.

In my experience, IKEA furniture is handed down multiple times.

I myself have IKEA CD racks that I bought, gave my parents when I moved, they gave them to my sister when she moved and needed them, and after fifteen years or so they are back in my current apartment.

(OT: why the hell did they discontinue this absolutely classic line? Just because it didn't really work for Blu-rays?)

Actually, my apartment looks quite eclectic, since I have lots and lots of IKEA furniture from my student days mingled with "solid" furniture bought later and a few high-end furniture pieces bought much later.

I think it depends on your mindset. If I look at the Ikea furniture in my house, about half of it is second hand. I specifically search for Ikea product names on second-hand sites instead of more generic terms like cabinet or table because I know the quality of Ikea products, where for others I'd have to guess.

I have a feeling that, gradually, the most visible businesses and products will become greener, with nearly everything else remaining massively polluting.

IKEA might become carbon neutral, while companies supplying furniture to furnished apartments, office buildings, etc. won't do anything. Nobody will know if "Franklin Property Management" or whatnot is or isn't green.

I'll be amazed if that's enough.

A good thing, but too late. 2030 is too late.

it really may be.

it may be too late to do anything short of dramatic geo-engineering to avert catastrophic climate change.

but there is still value in even marginal improvements to the climate change outcome. you have to compound the contribution over the entire remaining history of life on this planet.

this is a horrifying situation. no one should deny how badly humanity has screwed up.

> but there is still value in even marginal improvements to the climate change outcome.

Especially because even modest impacts slightly increase the chance to not hit the next tipping point.

Excellent, the EU should be a leader in this

It's an awful awful waste of money in a world with a billion people living on less than $2 a day just to comfort some rich brats.

But then they spend $444 million a year on advertising, so it's not like we don't live in a world were large amounts are $ are ploughed into the ground. Planting trees will at least have some benefit going forward.

Its the people living on less than $2 a day who are most likely to feel the worst inital effects of climate change. Us rich brats will be insulated for a while yet.

Seriously? Those living on $2 a day do so just to comfort some rich brats?

no, the parent is saying IKEAs efforts are just a matter of comforting "some rich brats", and that these efforts are "a billion people living on less than $2 a day"

Ah yes, the old "why should we fix potholes while children in Africa are starving" argument. Ridiculous as ever.

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