IKEA on the Circular Economy: Consumer Behavior Must Change

NORTHAMPTON, MA / ACCESSWIRE / December 5, 2022 / SAP

Foto: Accesswire

It's hard to enjoy sweet dreams as the mountains of mattresses in landfills are becoming a global environmental nightmare. According to an article in The Guardian, the U.S. alone throws away 18.2 million mattresses a year, but there are only 56 facilities available to recycle them.

Consumer behavior is behind this ever-growing conundrum - as retailers offer better and more affordable mattresses, consumers replace them more and more frequently.

"Changing consumer behavior is one of the ways to fix this problem," said Marcus Engman, chief creative officer for Ingka Group, IKEA Retail, at the London Design Festival's SAP-sponsored panel discussion about designing for a circular economy. "It's not enough to educate consumers to adopt circular behavior patterns. They also need the facilities and infrastructure to actually behave with a circular mindset. So instead of discarding old furniture and mattresses in landfill, customers can return them to us for creating new materials out of low value waste."

When asked what's the next step after circular economy, Engman responded that circular economy is not about phases. It's a mindset that will change the world. "We're moving into a future where waste is the raw material. It's about designing from the bottom up, and thinking in components," he explained.

Democratic Design

At IKEA, the concept of sustainability and circularity isn't a new idea. IKEA was quite sustainable from the beginning without even knowing it. The company's purpose has always been to create a better everyday life for the many people. This vision goes beyond home furnishings; it's about having a positive impact on entire communities.

"We're a low-price company. Being low price means you have to be low cost, which means adopting non-wasteful behavior in everything you do," said Engman. "It begins with designing processes that generate no waste whatsoever. For example, IKEA's flat packaging contains zero air, because we don't like shipping air. That doesn't make sense."

Common sense is in the IKEA DNA. With over 1 billion customers per year, the company sees an opportunity and a responsibility to design for change and not for production, because design and sustainability go hand in hand. The company handles resources as carefully as possible to increase affordability.

Changing people's mindset to consume more sustainably begins with making products that are affordable. People need to understand where materials come from and why things cost what they do. Cost is a crucial part of the design, along with four other design principles that are applied to every single product the company produces.