IKEA
(www.ikea.com)
“For more than 60 years IKEA has been perfecting ways of creating low prices — manufacturing as inexpensively as possible building our own stores, flat-packing furniture for customers to put together themselves. But IKEA’s responsibilities do not stop there. We also want the products to be free of hazardous substances. And w e don’t want the wood in bookcases, tables or other products in the store to come from areas where forests are being devastated.“
IKEA, headquartered in Sweden, is increasing its presence in the United States giving consumers access to products that are affordable yet made with the intention of being hazard free. This has meant establishing a comprehensive restricted substances list for all of their suppliers, banning materials like PVC (vinyl), and chemical classes like brominated flame retardants. Every IKEA product is designed with the goal of being hazard free throughout its life cycle. In areas where a safer material or chemical does not exist, IKEA establishes an aggressive research and development program to find a safer alternative. In 1999 the company phased out brominated flame retardants but found it had to use a chlorinated organohalogen as a replacement in one of its product lines. Since then it has been researching non-halogenated substitutes to continue the transition to safer materials that function well and meet international fire standards.
What makes IKEA unusual is that they have been doing this long before environmental issues were on the map as a corporate priority and necessity to maintaining competitiveness. IKEA has not been afraid to work collaboratively with NGOs such as Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and World Wildlife Fund. In 2002 they signed the Friends of the Earth UK’s Risky Chemical Pledge committing to:
- Using official lists, identify which man-made chemicals are suspected of building up in peoples bodies (bioaccumulation), or interfering with the hormone, immune or nervous systems.
- Produce a strategy to identify which of its own brand and branded products contain these chemicals.
- Produce a timeline to phase out these chemicals from its own-brand products, with the aim of eliminating them in 5 years, starting with those chemicals, which pose the greatest threat.
- Put pressure on manufacturers of branded products to do the same.
- Report publicly on progress on an annual basis.
IKEA is a world leader in sustainability. They are the only retailer in the United States who offers consumers affordable products ranging from beds, to shelves, to couches and rugs that can be safely brought into the home with the assurance that chemical exposure is prevented to the greatest extent possible for technologies available today.
