The world’s largest furniture retailer—responsible for 1% of the world’s lumber production—has been accused of turning swathes of woodlands, including Europe’s last remaining old-growth forests, into moonscapes.
That is according to a new documentary, Ikea Loves Wood, broadcast by Denmark’s public radio service DR. The documentary, which went to radio over the weekend, alleges that up to 4% of IKEA’s furniture products—including Sniglar cribs and Proppmatt chopping boards—come from Romania, where a panel of international experts accuses the giant of violating rules set up to protect the forest, wildlife, and biodiversity.
“It’s completely beyond the pale of what is called sustainable forestry in 2024,” according to Jacob Heilmann-Clausen, a biodiversity expert at Copenhagen University, who, after reviewing drone footage of felled trees in coups, said, “It looks like the old-fashioned forestry in third-world countries, where you ruthlessly go in and extract (every) resource.”
One of Hellmann Clausen’s main concerns is the lack of ‘habitat trees’ in logged coups, which does not comply with the Romanian rule that a single tree should be left for each hectare harvested. Ingka, the party responsible for operating the IKEA forest, denied any clear-cutting, instead arguing that it left habitat trees on a “landscape-level” rather than a “hectare-by-hectare” basis.
According to The Times, Ingka argued that the documentary leaned on “selective narratives” and left out “critical facts,” including misleading footage of trees felled on a site operated by a previous owner, with IKEA passing 18 independent audits on the Romanian forests this year alone:
“The density of our forests in Romania have increased by more than 1 million cubic metres since 2016 due to our responsible forest management practices.”
A spokesperson for Ingka, who responded to the allegations on behalf of IKEA.
The documentary comes just months after Greenpeace accused IKEA in its report, Assemble the Truth: Old-growth Forest Destruction in the Romanian Carpathians, of logging 2000 protected areas and selling the timber in 30 product lines across Europe: “IKEA must become a corporate frontrunner for the needed political action to put in place legally binding and effective biodiversity protection measures to fulfil Europe’s biodiversity targets,” according to Robert Cyglicki, Greenpeace’s Biodiversity Campaign Director in Central and Eastern Europe.
“Our natural heritage can’t be turned into pieces of furniture. Old forests are vital to the planet’s health and must be immediately protected,” Mr Cyglicki said, adding, “IKEA must live up to its sustainability promises and clean up its supply chain from old-growth forest destruction.”
