[sustran] [World Streets] Honk! Ikea flirts with WWF for a nice green world

Eric Britton (Paris, France) editor at worldstreets.org
Tue Apr 7 02:57:43 JST 2009


[http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/2009/apr/02/greenwash-ikea-diy-earth-hour]
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mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} Ikea – you can't build a green
reputation with a flatpack DIY manual Fred Pearce , guardian.co.uk,
Thursday 2 April 2009 11.05 BST


Huge out-of-town stores that are inaccessible by public transport,
illegally logged timber products and half-hearted attempts to join
WWF's Earth Hour. Who is Ikea trying to fool with its greenwash?

You'll know about Ikea. It's the place you drive to on a Saturday to
fill your house with bits of wood from foreign lands.
This week, they played a little April Fool's joke, with some viral
marketing about launching a new "Leko flatpack car".

When unveiled it turned out to be a computerised car-sharing scheme in
France. Not a new one, but a special customised service from an
established car-sharing service designed to get more customers to Ikea
stores.

Now, I am in favour of car-sharing. Anything to keep down the number of
cars clogging up Ikea car parks must be good. But this story is a bit
like the one I did on Disney theme parks a couple of weeks ago. It is
green tinsel on a business model that is all about persuading people to
make long carbon-intense journeys to buy their products.

The telling statistic was at the back end of the company press
release: "5.8% of Ikea France's customers already used a shared form of
transport to get to their preferred store." So 94.2% don't. Allowing
for the odd walker and cyclist, that must mean around 90% drive.

That's the problem, Ikea. You build your stores in places out of town
that are ill-served by public transport. You slap a big delivery charge
on any who don't want to take their own furniture home (£60 in my case,
I notice). And then you try and get greenie points for making it
slightly less hard to reach them in an environmentally acceptable
manner.

It won't wash.

The car-sharing scheme is part of a rather haphazard greenwash strategy
that has been going on at Ikea for a while. Last week its website
announced that "Ikea has signed up to WWF's Earth Hour 2009."

Earth Hour is an annual event promoted by the environment group WWF in
which we are all encouraged to turn off our lights for an hour as an
expression of support for cutting greenhouse gas emissions and halting
climate change. This year that hour was from 8.30pm on 28 March.

Ikea didn't turn all its store lights out. It might have been bad for
business. Instead it "turned all lighting in-store to minimum levels
consistent while maintaining a safe working environment for co-workers
and customers." Shouldn't they do that all the time? Or, since only
half of their UK stores stay open that late on a Saturday, they could
have shut the rest, allowing all the lights to go out. Just a thought.

In any event, I am not quite sure why WWF allowed lights-on Ikea to use
its logo to promote how it had "signed up to" (but not obeyed,
obviously) the Earth Hour. Nor why it gave Ikea gratuitous publicity on
its own site for half-heartedly complying with the Earth Hour.

Well, actually I am fairly sure. Ikea and WWF have a
long-term "business relationship". Ikea gives cash and a few
environmental initiatives, while WWF gives green kudos and some
environmental advice.

The panda logo is all over the Ikea website. Ikea is all over WWF's
website.

There have been some hard questions asked about this relationship among
other green groups. The Environmental Investigation Agency, for
instance, recently pointed out that Ikea has not even managed to stamp
out the use of illegally logged timber in its furniture, especially all
those flat-packs supplied from China.

Worse, the company has been actively opposing US laws set to come into
force in July aimed at banning imports of illegally logged timber.
Unless the company gets it overturned, every piece of furniture sold in
an Ikea store in the US will be required to have a paper trail showing
where the wood came from.

Even though other companies claim to be able to meet the rules, Ikea
told federal regulators that "trying to trace this information to
certify compliance all the way through the supply chain to the
harvesting of each and every tree is unrealistic."

For unrealistic, read expensive. Perhaps WWF should give back that
sponsorship money and ask Ikea to spend it checking its supply chains.
Or is that "unrealistic" too?

Who are the real greenwashers this week? Well, I think WWF should share
the accolade with Ikea, for services rendered.

• Do you know of any green claims that deserve closer examination?
Email your examples of to greenwash at guardian.co.uk or add your comments
below
About this article: This article was first published on guardian.co.uk
at 11.05 BST on Thursday 2 April 2009. It was last updated at 11.39 BST
on Thursday 2 April 2009. guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media
Limited 2009 Source and fair use: This article originally appeared in
the Gurdian of 2 Pril 2009, by their reporter Fred Pearce. You can view
their original article here. And click here to view World Street's
policy on Fair Use. Comments welcome.



--
Posted By Eric Britton (Paris, France) to World Streets at 4/06/2009
07:43:00 AM
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