A while ago, my partner LiZhen turned me onto a TEDx talk by Deborah Frieze. In this talk, titled “How I Became a Localist,” Frieze said something that really made me think: “You can’t fundamentally change big systems. You can only abandon them and start over or offer hospice to what’s dying.”
She went on to explain that systems — our educational systems, economic systems, criminal justice systems — are nonlinear and incredibly complex. These aren’t machines but living systems. And as with anything alive, they go through a natural cycle of rise, peak and decline. It’s the nature of life. In breath, out breath. Expansion, contraction. Birth, death.
When it comes to collective leadership, simply having the willingness to work in this way is not always enough, and trying to ensure everyone is heard without systems and structures to support this aim can become messy and unworkable.
A growing number of co-ops are exploring how the governance system of sociocracy can help them to ensure those involved have a say while still getting things done.
Sociocratic organisations are made up of small, semi-autonomous working groups called circles, connected by members who ensure the flow of information between them. Roles within circles are selected via an open, transparent selection process rather than a secret ballot.
Humanity is in overshoot. The last 50 years have marked a unique period in history during which our species has been able to access, extract, and consume natural resources at a rate faster than the Earth is able to regenerate them. As humanity continues to grow its population beyond the carrying capacity of its environment, the associated excess consumption is degrading the health of Earth’s ecosystems. By over-consuming our environment—and ecosystem stability—in the short-term, we are putting our planet’s long-term stability and capacity to provide for future generations in jeopardy.
I like everything all together. I like the fact that it’s a cooperative. I like working with my hands and I like physical labor. Everybody’s paid the same wage no matter how long you’ve been working at the Cheeseboard. Even though I’m one of the newest people there – I’ve only been there two years – I still have all of the rights, responsibilities and privileges as somebody who’s been there for 30 or 40 years. Everybody is valued equally and we operate by consensus, but we all make decisions collectively. We’re always trying to work together to make the decision work for everybody. So we reach unanimity on almost every decision.
The popularity of support animals attests to the mental health benefits of bonding with a pet, such as decreased stress, anxiety, and loneliness. According to the Mayo Clinic, having pets may also positively impact cardiovascular health and blood pressure control.
Unfortunately, many animals that could be treasured companions never get that opportunity. This is especially true in the state of Texas. According to the animal welfare group Best Friends Animal Society, approximately 568,325 cats and dogs entered Texas shelters in 2023, and an estimated 82,681 of these animals were killed.
Chicago, Illinois, has a rich history of grassroots organizing. Notable examples are the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council’s efforts to improve local economic and social conditions and the Black Panther Party’s establishment of housing cooperatives and free food, clothing, and medical services.
The solidarity economy movement has continued to gain momentum in Chicago. In 2024, a map from the worker-owned ChiCommons Cooperative showed more than 800 solidarity enterprises, co-ops, and mutual aid groups in the city.
Cooperative businesses, on principle and out of necessity, cannot exist in isolation! In order to survive and to create real, lasting economic impact in our communities, co-ops and our supporters must work together and be strategic.
In this session, Building Regional Cooperative Ecosystems, from Beyond Business as Usual 2024: Co-Ops and the Next Economy, you will learn more about the concept of a “cooperative ecosystem” and hear lessons from organizers building regional cooperative ecosystems as part of the global solidarity economy movement.
Already reeling from the turmoil of Covid-19 and the complex challenges posed by Brexit, the UK economy is facing yet another crisis: extraordinary spikes in wholesale electricity and gas prices. With surging wholesale prices, domestic energy bills are predicted to rise by at least 30 percent by early next year.
The fallout from rising gas prices is already being felt in the retail energy sector. Thirteen energy companies have gone bust due to rocketing natural gas prices since the start of August, meaning that two million customers have lost their supplier. There are nearly 50 energy suppliers in the UK, but pundits are predicting a ‘massacre’ in the sector, with upwards of 20 more companies expected to fold this winter. The energy market, already dominated by a handful of large companies, is likely to experience further concentration.
As the world looks towards COP26 for climate action, a newly launched guide shows individuals, communities and policymakers how to make a real hands-on difference in their own localities.
Created by international nonprofit Local Futures, the Guide features no less than 146 actions that can help reduce emissions, pollution, consumption and waste, while strengthening local communities and economies. They include everything from growing organic food and moving your money, to setting up farmers’ markets, community investment funds and co-operative businesses. They also include suggestions for those with an eye to policy changes that, frustratingly, have so far been absent from discussion in the COPs – for example, shifting subsidies and regulations to favor local economies instead of global corporations .
Green Mountain Spinnery is a 40 year old cooperative based in rural Vermont. They mill high quality yarns made in the U.S., support regional sheep farming, and develop ways of producing natural fibers that are environmentally friendly. Flat Iron Cafe is a cooperatively owned coffee shop based in Vermont. They are still in the developmental stages but intend to create a model that integrates coffee, community driven events, and supports local food entrepreneurs within the space.
In this episode I speak with worker-owner Larisa Demos about the inspiration behind Green Mountain Spinnery and Flat Iron’s development. Initially this interview was just going to be about The Spinnery but I decided to ask Larisa to share a bit about a new co-op she is helping to develop.
Today, as President Joe Biden’s $2 trillion infrastructure bill is debated in Congress, it’s worth recalling that this isn’t the first time the US has faced an infrastructure deficit. “By the 1930s nearly 90 percent of US urban dwellers had electricity, but 90 percent of rural homes were without power. Investor-owned utilities often denied service to rural areas, citing high development costs and low profit margins,” recalls one account.
The policy response: rural electric cooperatives (RECs). In 1935, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order No. 7037, establishing the Rural Electrification Administration—today’s Rural Utility Service (RUS)—which provided low-cost loans to co-ops to wire rural America; by 1953, 90 percent of rural Americans had power.
With schools across the world shutting due to Covid-19, e-learning has become an increasingly popular option around the world – but while this has increased platform revenues, teachers’ pay has stayed the same.
“Last year, during lockdown, I decided to start something different,” says John Hayes, co-founder of MyCoolClass, an international teacher-owned platform co-op set for launch next month. He hails from California but has been living in Warsaw, Poland, for nearly six years while working as an ESL teacher, in language schools and online.
After speaking with other freelance teachers and professionals affected by pay cuts, he decided the best solution would be to launch a co-operatively owned online learning platform.
After pandemic ‘this will be a different economy’, says Fed’s Powell
By: Christopher Rugaber
Still, Powell said many Americans who are out of work will struggle to find new jobs because some industries will likely be smaller than they were before the pandemic. In other cases, employers are seeking to use technology instead of workers where possible, he said.
“It’s important to remember we’re not going back to the same economy,” Powell said. “This will be a different economy.”
Powell spoke along with other global economic leaders during the meetings of the two global lending agencies. The roundtable discussion also addressed an emerging trend of wealthier nations recovering much faster from the pandemic than poorer countries, in part because of much faster vaccinations.
Ngozi Oknojo-Iweala, director general of the World Trade Organisation, said that the unequal distribution of vaccines could threaten the global economic recovery. Just 0.1 per cent of vaccines have gone to low-income countries, she said.
“If we don’t do something to change the pace at which the poorer countries are getting access to vaccines, it will take a long time to get to herd immunity for the world,” Oknojo-Iweala said. That, in turn, could threaten those nations already vaccinated, by spreading new variants that could push up case counts and reverse economic progress in wealthier countries.
On Tuesday, the IMF boosted its economic forecast for global economic growth this year to 6 per cent, up from a projection of 5.5 per cent in January. The increased growth is seen coming in large part from accelerated vaccine rollouts and the $US1.9 trillion ($2.5 trillion) rescue package the Biden administration pushed through Congress last month.
IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva told reporters on Wednesday that without the massive amounts of support provided by governments, last year’s recession, the worst since World War II, would have been three times more severe.
Once upon a time, the growth of a country’s Gross Domestic Product would actually lead to social progress. In the first few decades after the Second World War, growth was invested in collective institutions like health and education systems. Tax rates were progressive and growth was directed to those who needed it most.
Unfortunately, this so-called ‘Golden Age of Capitalism’ did not last very long. Within a few decades, we managed to shift to an economic system dictated by market fundamentalism. “We have been undermining our collective institutions, tax rates have been cut down for the very wealthiest and scientists are getting louder with their warnings about environmental breakdown”, author, researcher and advocate for a Wellbeing Economy Katherine Trebeck explains.
Ian Colburn, Zoey Fink, and Casey Holland all operate small, diversified farms in the Albuquerque, New Mexico area. The farmers already had plants in the ground in March when they realized restaurants and farmers’ markets—two of their biggest sales channels—would likely shut down due to the pandemic.
Colburn of Solarpunk Farm worried his acreage was too small to support a robust Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program and that he hadn’t planned for the kind of crop diversity that model demanded. Fink works part-time at Farm Shark Farm with her husband. They already had a CSA but didn’t think they could increase membership enough on their own to sell the rest of the vegetables.
“It was a scary time,” she said. “We thought: if we work together, we can be scaling up and serving 100 families per week.”
On November 2020, New York City street vendors from the Street Vendor Project marched over the iconic Brooklyn Bridge in force – food carts, multilingual signs and musical instruments in hand – to call city hall to action. Eight months had passed since the COVID-19 pandemic devastated their livelihoods, and they had received no relief. While the city took multiple measures to provide a lifeline to storefront businesses, vendors received no dedicated small business support. Instead, many continued to receive summonses and fines from a punitive enforcement regime. Struggling vendors were left to make ends meet supporting each other through mutual aid. Their patience was gone, and their proposal was simple: the city should decriminalize vending, lift the arbitrary, 38-year-old cap on…
To burnish their green credentials, companies have long paid to plant trees or protect forests in the hopes that nature will absorb their greenhouse gas emissions. Shopify, the Canadian company that runs e-commerce sites, wants to take a more hands-on approach — by paying a Texas venture to pull carbon dioxide from the sky and store it underground.
Shopify struck a deal this month with Carbon Engineering, which is about to start building a sprawling “direct air capture” facility in West Texas with its partner 1PointFive. Their plant, expected to be the largest of its kind, will use huge fans to draw in air and churn out pure CO2. Shopify has agreed to “buy” 10,000 metric tons of the gas that will be permanently sequestered in deep rock formations.
The initiative comes as corporations are redoubling promises to address climate change. Tech firms, airlines, and oil-and-gas giants have all recently pledged to reach “net-zero” emissions by 2050 — a loosely defined strategy which generally means they’re working to cut new emissions and reverse past pollution. Climate scientists say the world must now do both to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius by mid-century.
As part of those efforts, companies as wide-ranging as Microsoft, Audi, ExxonMobil and Stripe are investing in businesses developing cutting-edge technologies that remove carbon from the atmosphere and lock it away. Selling CO2-removal by the ton offers a way to fund these enormously expensive ventures while allowing companies to claim credit for (eventually) trimming their carbon footprints.
“We firmly believe these types of frontier technologies are going to be a necessary part of the climate solution,” said Stacy Kauk, director of Shopify’s sustainability fund. Along with the deal it struck to remove 10,000 tons in Texas, the ecommerce software company is buying 5,000 metric tons of carbon removal from Climeworks. The Swiss firm is expanding its direct air capture plant in Iceland and developing a new one in Norway.
Carbon Engineering’s working pilot plant in Squamish B.C.
Carbon Engineering
Shopify aims not only to curb its own carbon footprint from powering and heating its buildings and employees’ travel — nearly 8,000 metric tons in 2019 — but also to jumpstart broader demand for carbon removal projects by being an early adopter. “As direct air capture gains traction, we’re hoping this purchase, plus other purchases from other companies, will start to scale this service and drive down costs,” Kauk said.
The strategy is likely to catch on with other large businesses and heavy polluters, particularly in hard-to-decarbonize sectors like airlines and steel manufacturing, according to experts. Still, they stressed that these projects shouldn’t replace efforts to slash emissions directly from flying jets, shipping goods, powering buildings, or running factories.
“We need to make sure that we don’t dilute the stringency of an emissions reduction target of a given company,” said Kelly Levin, a senior associate in the World Resources Institute’s global climate program in Boston.
Offsets tied to direct air capture may have certain advantages over, say, planting trees. To start, there’s less guesswork around how much carbon is actually pulled from the sky using big machinery. And gas that’s sequestered deep underground is less likely to escape into the atmosphere than from a forest or wetland, where wildfires, plant disease, and human activity can set CO2 loose.
Projects that remove carbon and permanently store it may also avoid a key criticism of other types of offsets: that they don’t do much for the climate. For instance, a company can pay a nonprofit to protect swaths of the Amazon rainforest from deforestation; the company then claims credits for the CO2 that isn’t emitted as a result of its investment. But if the land isn’t likely to be developed anyway, then it’s impossible to say whether there’s any real benefit.
In Carbon Engineering’s case, the carbon removal and sequestration will only happen if someone pays to do it, said Derik Broekhoff, a senior scientist at the Stockholm Environment Institute who is based in Seattle.
The direct air capture plant in Texas will likely cost hundreds of millions of dollars to develop. At full scale, the facility could capture 1 million metric tons of CO2 every year, according to Carbon Engineering. The Canadian firm is licensing its technology to 1PointFive, a joint venture between a subsidiary of Occidental Petroleum Corp. and the private equity firm Rusheen Capital Management, based in Santa Monica, California.
Artist rendering of what Carbon Engineering’s large-scale Direct Air Capture plants will look like.
Carbon Engineering
Much of the captured carbon will be injected into old wells in the Permian Basin to force up remaining oil. But interested customers like Shopify can separately pay for “pure sequestration,” meaning the CO2 would go into long-term storage wells in deep rock formations, according to Steve Oldham, CEO of Carbon Engineering. The service is “a way of allowing anybody to buy negative emissions,” he said.
Construction on the giant fans is expected to start this year, with operations slated to begin in late 2024. Oldham said Occidental is working to find nearby sites for storing CO2 and obtain permits from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which regulates this type of well. Shopify has paid a deposit for the 10,000 tons and will hand over the rest of the money once the carbon is actually removed, said Kauk from Shopify. (She and Oldham declined to disclose financial details. Kauk said only that Shopify is investing $5 million annually to address climate change, of which at least $1 million is devoted to capturing and permanently storing atmospheric carbon.)
Current estimates put the price of sucking carbon from the sky at about $600 for every metric ton of CO2. Oldham said he expects it to drop to around $100 to $150 per metric ton once more facilities are built.
Despite the potential advantages, using direct air capture to reduce a company’s carbon emissions still raises questions and concerns, Broekhoff and other experts said.
United Airlines, for instance, recently announced plans to make a “multimillion-dollar investment” in 1PointFive, which is leading construction of the Texas facility. United said the investment will help to meet its goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent by 2050. But the airline isn’t buying a share of pure sequestration; it’s backing the entire venture. So it’s unclear how much United’s money leads to “additional” carbon removal, since the project is already underway. It’s also hard to say when, or by how much, this support will translate into actual emissions reductions.
“Investments are critical, but let’s not imagine that investing in and testing the technology is the same as actually using that technology toward climate goals,” said Simon Nicholson, co-director of the Institute for Carbon Removal Law and Policy at American University in Washington, D.C. In a blog post, Nicholson and colleagues said the United announcement should be “applauded” as well as the subject of “careful scrutiny.”
Given the high cost and technical complexity of these projects, there’s also the risk that some facilities won’t be built or operate as planned. If companies invest now and subtract the captured carbon from their current footprints, they may wind up overestimating the actual results.
Carbon Engineering’s pilot plant pellet reactor and associated equipment.
Carbon Engineering
So that outsiders can gauge whether carbon removal projects are delivering on their promises, developers should provide detailed, standardized, and accessible data, according to CarbonPlan, a nonprofit in California. But that’s not currently happening, researchers there said. CarbonPlan recently evaluated dozens of proposals for nature-based and technical solutions and said it couldn’t independently validate claims owing to “missing, incomplete, or duplicative” information.
“Without stronger disclosures, it’s almost impossible for companies — or the public — to know with confidence whether these activities are working,” CarbonPlan’s researchers wrote.
To burnish their green credentials, companies have long paid to plant trees or protect forests in the hopes that nature will absorb their greenhouse gas emissions. Shopify, the Canadian company that runs e-commerce sites, wants to take a more hands-on approach — by paying a Texas venture to pull carbon dioxide from the sky and store it underground.
Shopify struck a deal this month with Carbon Engineering, which is about to start building a sprawling “direct air capture” facility in West Texas with its partner 1PointFive. Their plant, expected to be the largest of its kind, will use huge fans to draw in air and churn out pure CO2. Shopify has agreed to “buy” 10,000 metric tons of the gas that will be permanently sequestered in deep rock formations.
The initiative comes as corporations are redoubling promises to address climate change. Tech firms, airlines, and oil-and-gas giants have all recently pledged to reach “net-zero” emissions by 2050 — a loosely defined strategy which generally means they’re working to cut new emissions and reverse past pollution. Climate scientists say the world must now do both to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius by mid-century.
As part of those efforts, companies as wide-ranging as Microsoft, Audi, ExxonMobil and Stripe are investing in businesses developing cutting-edge technologies that remove carbon from the atmosphere and lock it away. Selling CO2-removal by the ton offers a way to fund these enormously expensive ventures while allowing companies to claim credit for (eventually) trimming their carbon footprints.
“We firmly believe these types of frontier technologies are going to be a necessary part of the climate solution,” said Stacy Kauk, director of Shopify’s sustainability fund. Along with the deal it struck to remove 10,000 tons in Texas, the ecommerce software company is buying 5,000 metric tons of carbon removal from Climeworks. The Swiss firm is expanding its direct air capture plant in Iceland and developing a new one in Norway.
Carbon Engineering’s working pilot plant in Squamish B.C.
Carbon Engineering
Shopify aims not only to curb its own carbon footprint from powering and heating its buildings and employees’ travel — nearly 8,000 metric tons in 2019 — but also to jumpstart broader demand for carbon removal projects by being an early adopter. “As direct air capture gains traction, we’re hoping this purchase, plus other purchases from other companies, will start to scale this service and drive down costs,” Kauk said.
The strategy is likely to catch on with other large businesses and heavy polluters, particularly in hard-to-decarbonize sectors like airlines and steel manufacturing, according to experts. Still, they stressed that these projects shouldn’t replace efforts to slash emissions directly from flying jets, shipping goods, powering buildings, or running factories.
“We need to make sure that we don’t dilute the stringency of an emissions reduction target of a given company,” said Kelly Levin, a senior associate in the World Resources Institute’s global climate program in Boston.
Offsets tied to direct air capture may have certain advantages over, say, planting trees. To start, there’s less guesswork around how much carbon is actually pulled from the sky using big machinery. And gas that’s sequestered deep underground is less likely to escape into the atmosphere than from a forest or wetland, where wildfires, plant disease, and human activity can set CO2 loose.
Projects that remove carbon and permanently store it may also avoid a key criticism of other types of offsets: that they don’t do much for the climate. For instance, a company can pay a nonprofit to protect swaths of the Amazon rainforest from deforestation; the company then claims credits for the CO2 that isn’t emitted as a result of its investment. But if the land isn’t likely to be developed anyway, then it’s impossible to say whether there’s any real benefit.
In Carbon Engineering’s case, the carbon removal and sequestration will only happen if someone pays to do it, said Derik Broekhoff, a senior scientist at the Stockholm Environment Institute who is based in Seattle.
The direct air capture plant in Texas will likely cost hundreds of millions of dollars to develop. At full scale, the facility could capture 1 million metric tons of CO2 every year, according to Carbon Engineering. The Canadian firm is licensing its technology to 1PointFive, a joint venture between a subsidiary of Occidental Petroleum Corp. and the private equity firm Rusheen Capital Management, based in Santa Monica, California.
Artist rendering of what Carbon Engineering’s large-scale Direct Air Capture plants will look like.
Carbon Engineering
Much of the captured carbon will be injected into old wells in the Permian Basin to force up remaining oil. But interested customers like Shopify can separately pay for “pure sequestration,” meaning the CO2 would go into long-term storage wells in deep rock formations, according to Steve Oldham, CEO of Carbon Engineering. The service is “a way of allowing anybody to buy negative emissions,” he said.
Construction on the giant fans is expected to start this year, with operations slated to begin in late 2024. Oldham said Occidental is working to find nearby sites for storing CO2 and obtain permits from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which regulates this type of well. Shopify has paid a deposit for the 10,000 tons and will hand over the rest of the money once the carbon is actually removed, said Kauk from Shopify. (She and Oldham declined to disclose financial details. Kauk said only that Shopify is investing $5 million annually to address climate change, of which at least $1 million is devoted to capturing and permanently storing atmospheric carbon.)
Current estimates put the price of sucking carbon from the sky at about $600 for every metric ton of CO2. Oldham said he expects it to drop to around $100 to $150 per metric ton once more facilities are built.
Despite the potential advantages, using direct air capture to reduce a company’s carbon emissions still raises questions and concerns, Broekhoff and other experts said.
United Airlines, for instance, recently announced plans to make a “multimillion-dollar investment” in 1PointFive, which is leading construction of the Texas facility. United said the investment will help to meet its goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent by 2050. But the airline isn’t buying a share of pure sequestration; it’s backing the entire venture. So it’s unclear how much United’s money leads to “additional” carbon removal, since the project is already underway. It’s also hard to say when, or by how much, this support will translate into actual emissions reductions.
“Investments are critical, but let’s not imagine that investing in and testing the technology is the same as actually using that technology toward climate goals,” said Simon Nicholson, co-director of the Institute for Carbon Removal Law and Policy at American University in Washington, D.C. In a blog post, Nicholson and colleagues said the United announcement should be “applauded” as well as the subject of “careful scrutiny.”
Given the high cost and technical complexity of these projects, there’s also the risk that some facilities won’t be built or operate as planned. If companies invest now and subtract the captured carbon from their current footprints, they may wind up overestimating the actual results.
Carbon Engineering’s pilot plant pellet reactor and associated equipment.
Carbon Engineering
So that outsiders can gauge whether carbon removal projects are delivering on their promises, developers should provide detailed, standardized, and accessible data, according to CarbonPlan, a nonprofit in California. But that’s not currently happening, researchers there said. CarbonPlan recently evaluated dozens of proposals for nature-based and technical solutions and said it couldn’t independently validate claims owing to “missing, incomplete, or duplicative” information.
“Without stronger disclosures, it’s almost impossible for companies — or the public — to know with confidence whether these activities are working,” CarbonPlan’s researchers wrote.
Have you ever noticed how online capitalism cultists who condescendingly tell socialists they “just don’t understand economics” are always unable to lucidly defend their own understanding of economics?
If you’ve never pressed such a character to clearly and concisely explain what it is you “don’t understand” using their own words, I highly recommend that you try it, because it’s one of the funniest things in the world. If you keep interrogating them about each aspect of their belief system, demanding that they explain exactly what it is they know and how they know it, they will invariably end up getting frustrated and telling you to listen to this or that economist if they don’t rage quit on you altogether first.
It’s been almost a decade since Jocelyn Doucet first experimented with recycling plastic waste in a microwave.
Now he says the technology derived from those early efforts will make it possible to produce plastic almost exclusively from recycled materials.
“We’re consuming more and more plastics,” says the Quebec-based engineer and founder of Pyrowave, a company pioneering microwave-based plastic recycling technology. “Yet there are not that many solutions to address the end-of-life problem, and this is what we’re proposing.”
The technology is so promising it has caught the attention of French tire giant Michelin. Last year, the company announced a partnership with Pyrowave to build a microwave recycling system for tires. It will be the first time Doucet’s technology is used on a commercial scale.
Most recycling in Canada today is mechanical, where plastics are shredded before being melted down to make new, usually lower-quality, products. For the process to be viable, the stream of plastics entering the processing facility needs to be clean and well sorted, which poses huge logistical challenges. Pyrowave’s technology then uses high-powered microwaves to break clean polystyrene — a common plastic used to make everything from yogurt cups to keyboards — into molecular components, or monomers, that manufacturers can use to create entirely new polystyrene plastic.
Simple as it sounds, the approach is novel. Few researchers had successfully used microwaves to break plastic into its constituent parts until Doucet, who has a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the Polytechnique de Montréal, took up the challenge with a team in 2009.
At the time, he was working on food waste technologies and wanted a new challenge. “We started getting approached for plastic waste,” he says. Plastic recycling was something new.
He wondered if pyrolysis could be used in the recycling process. Pyrolysis is a chemical process that burns carbon-based materials like wood or plastic without oxygen to remove the material’s hydrogen and oxygen molecules, leaving nothing but carbon. It’s ancient — Egyptians used pyrolysis to make charcoal.
Doucet thought a modified version could be used to recycle plastic.
“Very quickly, we fell on a microwave unit in the lab and started playing with microwaves,” he said. They found high-powered microwaves worked — an exciting discovery for the environmentally minded team.
Doucet’s microwave process uses electric energy instead of heat, dramatically reducing the amount of energy and greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) needed to produce polystyrene plastic, he says. According to a forthcoming life cycle assessment by Pyrowave, producing polystyrene using microwave pyrolysis recycling is 40 percent more energy efficient than virgin oil production, Doucet adds.
Observers are reserving judgment.
“Pyrowave’s technology might play a role in terms of displacing the production of virgin plastic and materials, but until we have more transparent and verifiable data on the yields, environmental and climate impact, we need a cautionary approach,” says Shanar Tabrizi, chemical recycling and plastics-to-fuel policy officer for Zero Waste Europe.
wingedwolf / Getty Images
Those potential impacts are broad, from the energy required to collect, sort, and clean plastic waste before the recycling process to managing the toxic residues created by plastic additives. She also noted life-cycle assessments can be misleading, depending on their methodologies.
“It’s hard to assess (Pyrowave’s) claims and see whether there might be significant pollutants released in the process,” says Richard Heinberg, senior fellow at the Post Carbon Institute. “In general, anything we can do to recycle plastic in more environmentally friendly ways helps, but reducing the scale of production and consumption is even better.”
Maximizing the environmental potential of Doucet’s technology demands a wholesale restructuring of how we produce and dispose of plastics, the Quebec researcher said. New facilities that use microwave pyrolysis to manufacture plastic will need to be built. And as long as the price of virgin-oil plastic remains low, recycled plastic can’t compete. It will take government regulations mandating that new plastic products contain mostly recycled materials to make the switch, Doucet said.
He compared microwave pyrolysis recycling and virgin-oil plastic manufacturing to the difference between steam and electric trains. As electricity became widespread, train engineers quickly realized it was more efficient to build entire rail systems based on high-speed electric trains than it was to replace coal with electric heating coils in steam train boilers. The new technology pushed a wholesale shift in how rail systems worked.
“This is the opportunity to completely rethink,” Doucet says.
The petrochemical and oil and gas industries so far show no signs of slowing down.
Virgin-oil plastic factories have been integrated into oil and gas infrastructure like refineries and pipelines for decades — investments that industry is loath to abandon. The sector is betting on continued plastic production to stay afloat as the world transitions away from fossil fuels, with plastic manufacturing anticipated to fuel between 45 percent and 95 percent of the sector’s future growth. Fossil fuel and petrochemical companies are even spending $509 billion more worldwide to expand their facilities by 2024, according to a September 2020 report by the Carbon Tracker Initiative.
Rosemary Calvert / Getty Images
That has environmentalists concerned. While recycling — including microwave pyrolysis recycling — can be part of the solution, it can’t be used to justify current levels of production and plastic use, said Laura Yates, lead plastics campaigner at Greenpeace Canada. The organization has been leading efforts for greater government regulations to decrease overall plastic production and implement stringent recycling requirements in Canada.
In particular, Yates is concerned about efforts by the plastics industry to convert plastic waste into vehicle fuel. That will continue to stimulate virgin-oil plastic production and fail to reduce overall GHG emissions, Yates said.
Still, there are glimmers of hope. Virgin-oil plastic production decreased by four percent in 2020, and the trend is expected to continue in the coming decades, according to the Carbon Tracker Initiative. That shift is driven by more stringent rules in China and Europe mandating that plastic products be made primarily from recycled materials. They have also started to make recycled plastic economically competitive in those markets, Doucet said.
As well as the shift in Europe, the federal government is currently drafting new plastics regulations that could see similar policies implemented here, despite intense pushback from the plastics industry on key parts of the planned regulations. Doucet is hopeful that if the new rules are implemented, they will help make plastic recycling — including microwave pyrolysis recycling — commercially viable in Canada.
Doucet is honest about his technology’s limitations. It is only one tool to end the plastic crisis, not a panacea. Reducing how much plastic we use and ensuring what gets produced gets recycled more efficiently remain essential.
It’s been almost a decade since Jocelyn Doucet first experimented with recycling plastic waste in a microwave.
Now he says the technology derived from those early efforts will make it possible to produce plastic almost exclusively from recycled materials.
“We’re consuming more and more plastics,” says the Quebec-based engineer and founder of Pyrowave, a company pioneering microwave-based plastic recycling technology. “Yet there are not that many solutions to address the end-of-life problem, and this is what we’re proposing.”
The technology is so promising it has caught the attention of French tire giant Michelin. Last year, the company announced a partnership with Pyrowave to build a microwave recycling system for tires. It will be the first time Doucet’s technology is used on a commercial scale.
Most recycling in Canada today is mechanical, where plastics are shredded before being melted down to make new, usually lower-quality, products. For the process to be viable, the stream of plastics entering the processing facility needs to be clean and well sorted, which poses huge logistical challenges. Pyrowave’s technology then uses high-powered microwaves to break clean polystyrene — a common plastic used to make everything from yogurt cups to keyboards — into molecular components, or monomers, that manufacturers can use to create entirely new polystyrene plastic.
Simple as it sounds, the approach is novel. Few researchers had successfully used microwaves to break plastic into its constituent parts until Doucet, who has a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the Polytechnique de Montréal, took up the challenge with a team in 2009.
At the time, he was working on food waste technologies and wanted a new challenge. “We started getting approached for plastic waste,” he says. Plastic recycling was something new.
He wondered if pyrolysis could be used in the recycling process. Pyrolysis is a chemical process that burns carbon-based materials like wood or plastic without oxygen to remove the material’s hydrogen and oxygen molecules, leaving nothing but carbon. It’s ancient — Egyptians used pyrolysis to make charcoal.
Doucet thought a modified version could be used to recycle plastic.
“Very quickly, we fell on a microwave unit in the lab and started playing with microwaves,” he said. They found high-powered microwaves worked — an exciting discovery for the environmentally minded team.
Doucet’s microwave process uses electric energy instead of heat, dramatically reducing the amount of energy and greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) needed to produce polystyrene plastic, he says. According to a forthcoming life cycle assessment by Pyrowave, producing polystyrene using microwave pyrolysis recycling is 40 percent more energy efficient than virgin oil production, Doucet adds.
Observers are reserving judgment.
“Pyrowave’s technology might play a role in terms of displacing the production of virgin plastic and materials, but until we have more transparent and verifiable data on the yields, environmental and climate impact, we need a cautionary approach,” says Shanar Tabrizi, chemical recycling and plastics-to-fuel policy officer for Zero Waste Europe.
wingedwolf / Getty Images
Those potential impacts are broad, from the energy required to collect, sort, and clean plastic waste before the recycling process to managing the toxic residues created by plastic additives. She also noted life-cycle assessments can be misleading, depending on their methodologies.
“It’s hard to assess (Pyrowave’s) claims and see whether there might be significant pollutants released in the process,” says Richard Heinberg, senior fellow at the Post Carbon Institute. “In general, anything we can do to recycle plastic in more environmentally friendly ways helps, but reducing the scale of production and consumption is even better.”
Maximizing the environmental potential of Doucet’s technology demands a wholesale restructuring of how we produce and dispose of plastics, the Quebec researcher said. New facilities that use microwave pyrolysis to manufacture plastic will need to be built. And as long as the price of virgin-oil plastic remains low, recycled plastic can’t compete. It will take government regulations mandating that new plastic products contain mostly recycled materials to make the switch, Doucet said.
He compared microwave pyrolysis recycling and virgin-oil plastic manufacturing to the difference between steam and electric trains. As electricity became widespread, train engineers quickly realized it was more efficient to build entire rail systems based on high-speed electric trains than it was to replace coal with electric heating coils in steam train boilers. The new technology pushed a wholesale shift in how rail systems worked.
“This is the opportunity to completely rethink,” Doucet says.
The petrochemical and oil and gas industries so far show no signs of slowing down.
Virgin-oil plastic factories have been integrated into oil and gas infrastructure like refineries and pipelines for decades — investments that industry is loath to abandon. The sector is betting on continued plastic production to stay afloat as the world transitions away from fossil fuels, with plastic manufacturing anticipated to fuel between 45 percent and 95 percent of the sector’s future growth. Fossil fuel and petrochemical companies are even spending $509 billion more worldwide to expand their facilities by 2024, according to a September 2020 report by the Carbon Tracker Initiative.
Rosemary Calvert / Getty Images
That has environmentalists concerned. While recycling — including microwave pyrolysis recycling — can be part of the solution, it can’t be used to justify current levels of production and plastic use, said Laura Yates, lead plastics campaigner at Greenpeace Canada. The organization has been leading efforts for greater government regulations to decrease overall plastic production and implement stringent recycling requirements in Canada.
In particular, Yates is concerned about efforts by the plastics industry to convert plastic waste into vehicle fuel. That will continue to stimulate virgin-oil plastic production and fail to reduce overall GHG emissions, Yates said.
Still, there are glimmers of hope. Virgin-oil plastic production decreased by four percent in 2020, and the trend is expected to continue in the coming decades, according to the Carbon Tracker Initiative. That shift is driven by more stringent rules in China and Europe mandating that plastic products be made primarily from recycled materials. They have also started to make recycled plastic economically competitive in those markets, Doucet said.
As well as the shift in Europe, the federal government is currently drafting new plastics regulations that could see similar policies implemented here, despite intense pushback from the plastics industry on key parts of the planned regulations. Doucet is hopeful that if the new rules are implemented, they will help make plastic recycling — including microwave pyrolysis recycling — commercially viable in Canada.
Doucet is honest about his technology’s limitations. It is only one tool to end the plastic crisis, not a panacea. Reducing how much plastic we use and ensuring what gets produced gets recycled more efficiently remain essential.
In the context of user-generated content platforms, the coop model is just such a natural fit. One of the principle questions that made a cooperative model feel relevant is this idea of, “Who’s generating value, and who’s capturing it?” Under capitalism, it’s people with ownership who end up capturing most of the value. So at a base level, sharing ownership with a company’s users and creators can align incentives. And that can dramatically affect the decisions that a platform makes, and steer it in a way that is to the benefit of the people who actually use it and rely on it.
What’s Spotify valued at, a billion or more? And they’re completely dependent on musicians to make their platform’s content. Lately though, there has been more awareness that this model is not serving its creators. So where coops pop up naturally is when people are like, “I’m not being served.”
For most Americans, what threatens health also threatens wealth. The COVID-19 pandemic triggered the worst economic crisis in nearly a century, with millions suddenly facing hunger, unemployment, or eviction. But Wall Street doesn’t represent most Americans. In the parallel universe of the financial industry, stock indices soared to historic peaks as Americans wished good riddance to the deadliest year in our history. Detached from the daily lives of most Americans, the stock market surge almost exclusively benefited the disproportionately wealthy, and the pandemic once again lived up to its distinction as “the great clarifier.”
For years, Wall Street has been increasingly out of touch with the underlying economy of workers, jobs, and wages, and the fortunes reaped by hedge funds and billionaires have not helped the millions of Americans in dire need.
On your first day working at Taharka Brothers, a majority-Black-owned ice cream maker in Baltimore, you can join the flavor committee and help create flavors like the limited holiday edition Sweet Potato Crumble. Or you can join the social justice committee and vet local organizations to support through ice cream sales, like the Baltimore Action Legal Team. If none of those are to your liking, there are other committees you can join.
If you work there for at least 15 months and earn top marks on your most recent performance review, you can become a part-owner of Taharka Brothers, and have not just a say but also a final vote on major business decisions and policies like those performance reviews.
This storywas originally published by HuffPost and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Deskcollaboration.
The Ikea store in Queens, New York, which opened on January 14, marked a decided departure for the iconic home furnishings brand. Located in the Rego Park Shopping Center, the 11,500-square-foot open layout — a new, smaller format for Ikea — is divided into core areas of the home, offering small-space solutions tailored to city living. Rooms are thoughtfully merchandised with easily portable accessories like lamps and throw pillows that customers can take with them on the bus or subway, both of which are a block away — a key factor in choosing the store’s location, given that more than half of city residents use public transportation.
Digital stations allow shoppers to self-pay and arrange furniture delivery for bigger pieces for a flat fee of $49. The company is working to make all last-mile deliveries in New York City by electric vehicle, according to Jennifer Keesson, country sustainability manager for Ikea U.S. — a test run on the way to making the last mile of its more than 2 million annual home deliveries nationwide zero emissions by 2025.
The Swedish powerhouse set out 80 years ago “to create a better everyday life for the many people” — as its motto goes — by putting sleek, stylish home furnishings within the budgets of the masses, and became a $35.4 billion (2020 revenues) market force in the process. And just as the brand is widely credited with democratizing design, it’s now moving to make sustainable living the norm rather than the exception, with a sprawling strategy that’s wildly ambitious in scope.
Ikea’s overarching goal is to become “climate positive” by 2030 — reducing more greenhouse gas emissions, or GHGs, than its entire value chain emits. It plans to do this while still growing its business by designing new products, moving into new markets, and building dozens, perhaps hundreds, of new stores in that time. The company is charging ahead with plans to open 50 more stores (of various sizes and formats) in 2021 alone.
Expanding its retail footprint on a warming planet may seem to fly directly in the face of Ikea’s plan to reduce its colossal climate footprint. In the last year, moves to decrease energy use across the business, from manufacturing to what it serves in its restaurants, have reduced its climate footprint per product sold by 7 percent, the company estimates. Meeting its 2030 target while selling ever more will mean cutting the average climate footprint per product by 70 percent.
Given that Ikea emitted the equivalent of 24.9 million tons of carbon dioxide in 2019 — accounting for 0.1 percent of the world’s GHG emissions that year — it’s a Herculean undertaking that encompasses virtually every element of its business, from the materials it sources through product manufacturing and transport. Emissions reductions will also come from efforts to pull carbon out of the atmosphere (without the use of carbon offsets) and influence supplier and customer behavior.
Making products last longer, and giving old products second lives, is a central pillar of its climate ambitions: Ikea aims to become a “100 percent circular business” by 2030. That means creating home goods that not only meet Ikea’s definition of “democratic design” — affordable, high-quality, sustainable, stylish, and functional — but also can be reused, refurbished, recycled, or remanufactured into new items.
Materials contribute the most to Ikea’s overall climate footprint, followed by the use of products in customer homes. Squeezing carbon savings out of those budgets poses the greatest hurdles toward meeting its ambitious targets, which were set to align with the Paris climate accord goal of keeping global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
“An increasing number of companies have said they’ll be climate positive by 2040 or 2050, but relatively few have said 2030,” said Andrew Winston, a corporate sustainability strategist and author of “The Big Pivot.” “Ikea’s challenge is also much more complicated because they manufacture tons of different products — unlike a company like Google, which has also set incredibly aggressive goals.”
The sprawling infrastructure and commercial leverage that enables the company to manufacture and sell millions of products is exactly what Ikea is banking on to realize its climate goals.
“Obviously the consumption model of the 1900s that we were part of will not work in the future, because we’re consuming more than the planet can provide,” said Ingka Group CEO Jesper Brodin on a Harvard Business Review podcast last December. Ingka Group is the largest of 12 strategic partners in Ikea’s franchise system, operating 380 Ikea stores around the world.
“I love mass production,” said Brodin, “because if you put it in the right aspect, you can scale up change so much better and faster. If you can scale something that’s climate-positive, that’s probably the best and fastest way of doing it — and bring the cost down so sustainability doesn’t become something that’s only for those who can afford it.”
Seeing the forest for the trees
Arguably few companies, particularly in the retail industry, have Ikea’s vision and knack for innovation. Founded in 1943 by the late Ingvar Kamprad — the name is an acronym of his initials, his family farm (Elmtaryd), and his birthplace (Agunnaryd) — it quickly became known for low prices. Chagrined competitors tried to pressure suppliers to boycott the brand, driving Kamprad to start designing products in-house and thinking early about moving beyond his home market.
Ikea shifted to flat-pack, self-assembly products in 1953 to minimize shipping costs and damage to mail-order deliveries. In 1970, the first self-service area was opened at Ikea’s flagship store near Stockholm, which allowed customers to walk out with flat-pack furniture in hand to assemble at home. The debut of Ikea’s first store outside of Scandinavia, in Switzerland, in 1973 set the stage for international expansion: Ikea is now the world’s largest home furnishings business, with nearly 530 stores (including test formats and planning studios) in more than 50 countries.
The seeds of Ikea’s shift to sustainability were planted (literally) in 1998, with the launch of the “Sow a Seed” Foundation, which sought to rehabilitate large swaths of rainforest lost to logging and forest fires in Malaysian Borneo. Over the next two decades, Ikea funded the replanting of 3 million trees across 31,000 now-protected acres of rainforest.
Sustainable forestry has long been a key focus of the brand, for good reason. Ikea uses wood in 60 percent of its products. Last year, it used just under 671 million cubic feet of wood (enough to fill 18 Empire State Buildings) in home furnishings and packaging, most of it from Poland, Russia, Belarus, Sweden, and Germany. About 12 percent of it was recycled and nearly all the rest was certified by the Forest Stewardship Council, a nonprofit group that promotes responsible forestry (Ikea is a founding member), meaning its harvesting did not contribute to deforestation.
Ikea still runs into criticism from time to time. Last year, the company was accused of illegally sourcing wood from Ukraine; a third-party independent investigation found no evidence of such timber in its supply chain, attributing the allegations to ambiguity surrounding the law concerning certain forest management practices. FSC is now working to resolve the issue.
Wood as a resource is under threat from deforestation, wildfires, pests, and other climate change impacts. The brand’s commitment to sustainable forest management is intended to ensure that its most critical raw material remains in sufficient supply. It also aims to enhance biodiversity, support those whose livelihoods are forest-dependent and protect vital carbon-sequestering trees. A big chunk of the company’s emissions reductions rely on keeping carbon locked up in the plants and soils of healthy forests.
To that end, Ikea invests heavily in forestland, where the company can reap carefully managed timber. Earlier this month, Ingka Group announced its acquisition of nearly 11,000 forested acres in southeast Georgia from The Conservation Fund, assuming its legally binding obligations to protect the land from fragmentation, restore trees, and protect wildlife. The company now owns 136,000 acres of forest across five states, and some 613,000 acres combined in the U.S. and Europe.
Material change
“Seventy percent of our footprint comes from materials,” said Pia Heidenmark Cook, Ingka Group’s chief sustainability officer. “So the products we put on the market, the materials we choose and where we source them from are critical.”
Ikea is taking a close look at its entire supply chain, said Cook, with the goal of using only recycled or renewable materials (like sustainably sourced wood and cotton) in its over 9,500 products by 2030. Today 10 percent of products contain recycled material, such as plastic and polyester, and 60 percent contain renewable materials.
The company has so far mapped out how to achieve half its materials footprint reduction goals for 2030 and has to figure out how to get the rest of the way there.
In the December podcast, Brodin called raw materials the most challenging part of the sustainability equation, noting that materials R&D has been one of the brand’s top investment priorities for nearly a decade.
“In terms of material innovation, the majority of investment is connected to our sustainability agenda — to find new materials that have a smaller climate or water footprint than what we use today,” said Cook.
Laminated veneer lumber, or LVL, is one material showing promise. A relatively new engineered product, it comprises multiple thin layers of wood glued together and cuts down on wood consumption by up to 40 percent. Its strength is comparable to metal in some applications, making it a potentially viable substitute for steel and aluminum, which have a high climate footprint due to their energy-intensive production process.
Another project explores using rice straw — a harvesting residue that’s typically burned and contributes to air pollution in places like northern India — as a new renewable material source.
Ikea has also partnered with clothing retailer H&M and forest products manufacturer Stora Enso to invest in Tree To Textile, a company that transforms wood cellulose into a sustainable textile fiber that could potentially serve as an alternative to cotton, Ikea’s second-most-used raw material behind wood. Last year, the brand used nearly 142,000 tons of the water-intensive crop — 0.5 percent of cotton production worldwide.
So far, alternative materials are still in testing phases or limited use. Ikea’s rice-straw product prototypes debuted as the FÖRÄNDRING (“change” in Swedish) collection of rugs, bowls, and baskets at stores in India last year, with limited volumes in a few European markets.
Should the company determine these new materials are viable, it will take years to update designs, adapt supply chains, and bring production to scale. But the advantage of Ikea’s size and clout means that if the company does identify any breakthrough renewable materials, it could push suppliers to get on board.
“Ikea is fairly unique in its ability to tell a potential supplier, ‘If you can’t meet our terms, we’ll find someone else who will,’” said Tom Eggert, a senior lecturer on business sustainability at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Whether it’s a wood alternative or plant-based plastics or something else entirely, they have the buying power to create a market where one may not yet exist.”
While cheap sofas and tables are the company’s bread and butter, the brand is one of the world’s largest food sellers: 680 million customers visited its food outlets in 2019. It sells a billion of its signature Swedish meatballs a year.
A worker prepares to serve chicken meatballs in an IKEA store.NOAH SEELAM / AFP via Getty Images
But meat is an ecological nightmare — livestock production accounts for more than 14 percent of total global greenhouse emissions and is a leading cause of deforestation. So Ikea is retooling its menu. The company has sold over 5 million veggie hot dogs since unveiling them in 2018. Last August, it introduced the HUVUDROLL plant ball, an alternative to its iconic meatball. With ingredients like pea protein and potatoes, it mimics meat’s taste and texture (unlike the brand’s veggie balls, which debuted in 2015), with a climate footprint that’s only 4 percent of the beef-and-pork original.
The company aims to make 50 percent of its restaurant entrees plant-based by 2025, and 80 percent of them non-red meat (of animals raised for food, cows and pigs are the biggest GHG contributors). The brand’s packaged food will also be 80 percent plant-based within five years.
Ikea’s other not-so-small side hustle is helping eliminate fossil fuels from its retail operations and production: The company is striving for 100 percent renewable energy across its entire value chain by 2030 — including helping secure 100 percent renewable electricity for its nearly 1,600 suppliers. Ikea has been investing in solutions like solar and wind farms around the world since 2009. Its clean energy portfolio now includes 547 wind turbines and two solar farms in 14 countries, and more than 920,000 solar panels on the roofs of Ikea stores and warehouses.
Last year, for the first time, Ingka Group generated more renewable energy — by a third — than it consumed globally in retail and distribution operations.
“Ikea is very much ahead of the curve in retail,” said Winston. “They were one of the biggest renewable energy purchasers before the big tech companies started their buying sprees.”
Widening the circle
In order to realize its vision of becoming 100 percent circular by 2030 — eliminating waste by keeping materials and finished products in use — Ikea must not only make products out of recycled and recyclable materials, but also convince its hundreds of millions of customers to recycle or reuse them.
“A truly circular economy approach is going to have to deal with end of life of products in a totally revolutionary way compared with their current business model,” said ecological economist Tim Jackson, author of the upcoming book “Post Growth: Life After Capitalism.”
The company is exploring how to entice customers to do their part.
During its #BuyBackFriday campaign late last year — conceived as an alternative to traditional Black Friday marketing blitzes — Ikea stores in 27 countries offered to buy back and resell thousands of used home furnishings. Customers received vouchers worth between 30 percent and 50 percent of their item’s original price, depending on its condition. (Anything that couldn’t be resold was recycled or donated to COVID-19 community outreach projects.) Down the road, as the company develops its methods, a bought-back chair could be stripped to its frame, polished, painted, and reshaped into a new chair.
Ikea is turning their “as-is” sections — where last year, 30.5 million discontinued and seasonal items, floor samples and customer returns were sold at discounted prices — into “circular hubs.” Customers can bargain hunt for second hand furnishings while picking up tips on fixing, cleaning or hacking their Ikea products. There are plans to launch hubs in half of Ikea’s stores by the end of the year.
Ikea’s first entirely secondhand store, a six-month test project, debuted in Eskilstuna, Sweden, last November.
“The perception of Ikea as a mass producer of stuff that doesn’t last very long has probably been its biggest Achilles’ heel,” Winston said. “This relatively new effort to change the lifecycle of their products by refurbishing, reselling, or entirely recycling them is probably one of the most important things that they’re doing.”
Jackson put a fine point on it: “#BuyBackFriday was a symbolic gesture. It needs to be an everyday reality.”
Cook says Ikea’s challenge “is to make sustainable living mainstream.” The company has had some past success. Back in 2015, when the most popular alternatives to inefficient incandescent light bulbs were halogens and compact fluorescent lamps, Ikea switched all its lighting products to light-emitting diodes (LEDs), believing that it could build an economy of scale and make LEDs a commercial success. The bulbs sold for about $7 at the time; they now cost less than $1 each and Ikea sold 56 million of them in 2019.
“In general, we are always trying to support the education of our customers [on] how to live a more sustainable and a healthier life at home,” Keesson said.
It’s reasonable to question how any company with a business model based on selling more and more stuff can expand in a truly sustainable way. Some argue that with a burgeoning global middle class on the rise and eager to spend their disposable income, we need companies that will make the effort to stay within the limits of what the planet can provide.
Thisstorywas originally published byHuffPostand is reproduced here as part of theClimate Deskcollaboration.
The Ikea store in Queens, New York, which opened on January 14, marked a decided departure for the iconic home furnishings brand. Located in the Rego Park Shopping Center, the 11,500-square-foot open layout — a new, smaller format for Ikea — is divided into core areas of the home, offering small-space solutions tailored to city living. Rooms are thoughtfully merchandised with easily portable accessories like lamps and throw pillows that customers can take with them on the bus or subway, both of which are a block away — a key factor in choosing the store’s location, given that more than half of city residents use public transportation.
Digital stations allow shoppers to self-pay and arrange furniture delivery for bigger pieces for a flat fee of $49. The company is working to make all last-mile deliveries in New York City by electric vehicle, according to Jennifer Keesson, country sustainability manager for Ikea U.S. — a test run on the way to making the last mile of its more than 2 million annual home deliveries nationwide zero emissions by 2025.
The Swedish powerhouse set out 80 years ago “to create a better everyday life for the many people” — as its motto goes — by putting sleek, stylish home furnishings within the budgets of the masses, and became a $35.4 billion (2020 revenues) market force in the process. And just as the brand is widely credited with democratizing design, it’s now moving to make sustainable living the norm rather than the exception, with a sprawling strategy that’s wildly ambitious in scope.
Ikea’s overarching goal is to become “climate positive” by 2030 — reducing more greenhouse gas emissions, or GHGs, than its entire value chain emits. It plans to do this while still growing its business by designing new products, moving into new markets, and building dozens, perhaps hundreds, of new stores in that time. The company is charging ahead with plans to open 50 more stores (of various sizes and formats) in 2021 alone.
Expanding its retail footprint on a warming planet may seem to fly directly in the face of Ikea’s plan to reduce its colossal climate footprint. In the last year, moves to decrease energy use across the business, from manufacturing to what it serves in its restaurants, have reduced its climate footprint per product sold by 7 percent, the company estimates. Meeting its 2030 target while selling ever more will mean cutting the average climate footprint per product by 70 percent.
Given that Ikea emitted the equivalent of 24.9 million tons of carbon dioxide in 2019 — accounting for 0.1 percent of the world’s GHG emissions that year — it’s a Herculean undertaking that encompasses virtually every element of its business, from the materials it sources through product manufacturing and transport. Emissions reductions will also come from efforts to pull carbon out of the atmosphere (without the use of carbon offsets) and influence supplier and customer behavior.
Making products last longer, and giving old products second lives, is a central pillar of its climate ambitions: Ikea aims to become a “100 percent circular business” by 2030. That means creating home goods that not only meet Ikea’s definition of “democratic design” — affordable, high-quality, sustainable, stylish, and functional — but also can be reused, refurbished, recycled, or remanufactured into new items.
Materials contribute the most to Ikea’s overall climate footprint, followed by the use of products in customer homes. Squeezing carbon savings out of those budgets poses the greatest hurdles toward meeting its ambitious targets, which were set to align with the Paris climate accord goal of keeping global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
“An increasing number of companies have said they’ll be climate positive by 2040 or 2050, but relatively few have said 2030,” said Andrew Winston, a corporate sustainability strategist and author of “The Big Pivot.” “Ikea’s challenge is also much more complicated because they manufacture tons of different products — unlike a company like Google, which has also set incredibly aggressive goals.”
The sprawling infrastructure and commercial leverage that enables the company to manufacture and sell millions of products is exactly what Ikea is banking on to realize its climate goals.
“Obviously the consumption model of the 1900s that we were part of will not work in the future, because we’re consuming more than the planet can provide,” said Ingka Group CEO Jesper Brodin on a Harvard Business Review podcast last December. Ingka Group is the largest of 12 strategic partners in Ikea’s franchise system, operating 380 Ikea stores around the world.
“I love mass production,” said Brodin, “because if you put it in the right aspect, you can scale up change so much better and faster. If you can scale something that’s climate-positive, that’s probably the best and fastest way of doing it — and bring the cost down so sustainability doesn’t become something that’s only for those who can afford it.”
Seeing the forest for the trees
Arguably few companies, particularly in the retail industry, have Ikea’s vision and knack for innovation. Founded in 1943 by the late Ingvar Kamprad — the name is an acronym of his initials, his family farm (Elmtaryd), and his birthplace (Agunnaryd) — it quickly became known for low prices. Chagrined competitors tried to pressure suppliers to boycott the brand, driving Kamprad to start designing products in-house and thinking early about moving beyond his home market.
Ikea shifted to flat-pack, self-assembly products in 1953 to minimize shipping costs and damage to mail-order deliveries. In 1970, the first self-service area was opened at Ikea’s flagship store near Stockholm, which allowed customers to walk out with flat-pack furniture in hand to assemble at home. The debut of Ikea’s first store outside of Scandinavia, in Switzerland, in 1973 set the stage for international expansion: Ikea is now the world’s largest home furnishings business, with nearly 530 stores (including test formats and planning studios) in more than 50 countries.
The seeds of Ikea’s shift to sustainability were planted (literally) in 1998, with the launch of the “Sow a Seed” Foundation, which sought to rehabilitate large swaths of rainforest lost to logging and forest fires in Malaysian Borneo. Over the next two decades, Ikea funded the replanting of 3 million trees across 31,000 now-protected acres of rainforest.
Sustainable forestry has long been a key focus of the brand, for good reason. Ikea uses wood in 60 percent of its products. Last year, it used just under 671 million cubic feet of wood (enough to fill 18 Empire State Buildings) in home furnishings and packaging, most of it from Poland, Russia, Belarus, Sweden, and Germany. About 12 percent of it was recycled and nearly all the rest was certified by the Forest Stewardship Council, a nonprofit group that promotes responsible forestry (Ikea is a founding member), meaning its harvesting did not contribute to deforestation.
Ikea still runs into criticism from time to time. Last year, the company was accused of illegally sourcing wood from Ukraine; a third-party independent investigation found no evidence of such timber in its supply chain, attributing the allegations to ambiguity surrounding the law concerning certain forest management practices. FSC is now working to resolve the issue.
Wood as a resource is under threat from deforestation, wildfires, pests, and other climate change impacts. The brand’s commitment to sustainable forest management is intended to ensure that its most critical raw material remains in sufficient supply. It also aims to enhance biodiversity, support those whose livelihoods are forest-dependent and protect vital carbon-sequestering trees. A big chunk of the company’s emissions reductions rely on keeping carbon locked up in the plants and soils of healthy forests.
To that end, Ikea invests heavily in forestland, where the company can reap carefully managed timber. Earlier this month, Ingka Group announced its acquisition of nearly 11,000 forested acres in southeast Georgia from The Conservation Fund, assuming its legally binding obligations to protect the land from fragmentation, restore trees, and protect wildlife. The company now owns 136,000 acres of forest across five states, and some 613,000 acres combined in the U.S. and Europe.
Material change
“Seventy percent of our footprint comes from materials,” said Pia Heidenmark Cook, Ingka Group’s chief sustainability officer. “So the products we put on the market, the materials we choose and where we source them from are critical.”
Ikea is taking a close look at its entire supply chain, said Cook, with the goal of using only recycled or renewable materials (like sustainably sourced wood and cotton) in its over 9,500 products by 2030. Today 10 percent of products contain recycled material, such as plastic and polyester, and 60 percent contain renewable materials.
The company has so far mapped out how to achieve half its materials footprint reduction goals for 2030 and has to figure out how to get the rest of the way there.
In the December podcast, Brodin called raw materials the most challenging part of the sustainability equation, noting that materials R&D has been one of the brand’s top investment priorities for nearly a decade.
“In terms of material innovation, the majority of investment is connected to our sustainability agenda — to find new materials that have a smaller climate or water footprint than what we use today,” said Cook.
Laminated veneer lumber, or LVL, is one material showing promise. A relatively new engineered product, it comprises multiple thin layers of wood glued together and cuts down on wood consumption by up to 40 percent. Its strength is comparable to metal in some applications, making it a potentially viable substitute for steel and aluminum, which have a high climate footprint due to their energy-intensive production process.
Another project explores using rice straw — a harvesting residue that’s typically burned and contributes to air pollution in places like northern India — as a new renewable material source.
Ikea has also partnered with clothing retailer H&M and forest products manufacturer Stora Enso to invest in Tree To Textile, a company that transforms wood cellulose into a sustainable textile fiber that could potentially serve as an alternative to cotton, Ikea’s second-most-used raw material behind wood. Last year, the brand used nearly 142,000 tons of the water-intensive crop — 0.5 percent of cotton production worldwide.
So far, alternative materials are still in testing phases or limited use. Ikea’s rice-straw product prototypes debuted as the FÖRÄNDRING (“change” in Swedish) collection of rugs, bowls, and baskets at stores in India last year, with limited volumes in a few European markets.
Should the company determine these new materials are viable, it will take years to update designs, adapt supply chains, and bring production to scale. But the advantage of Ikea’s size and clout means that if the company does identify any breakthrough renewable materials, it could push suppliers to get on board.
“Ikea is fairly unique in its ability to tell a potential supplier, ‘If you can’t meet our terms, we’ll find someone else who will,’” said Tom Eggert, a senior lecturer on business sustainability at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Whether it’s a wood alternative or plant-based plastics or something else entirely, they have the buying power to create a market where one may not yet exist.”
While cheap sofas and tables are the company’s bread and butter, the brand is one of the world’s largest food sellers: 680 million customers visited its food outlets in 2019. It sells a billion of its signature Swedish meatballs a year.
A worker prepares to serve chicken meatballs in an IKEA store.NOAH SEELAM / AFP via Getty Images
But meat is an ecological nightmare — livestock production accounts for more than 14 percent of total global greenhouse emissions and is a leading cause of deforestation. So Ikea is retooling its menu. The company has sold over 5 million veggie hot dogs since unveiling them in 2018. Last August, it introduced the HUVUDROLL plant ball, an alternative to its iconic meatball. With ingredients like pea protein and potatoes, it mimics meat’s taste and texture (unlike the brand’s veggie balls, which debuted in 2015), with a climate footprint that’s only 4 percent of the beef-and-pork original.
The company aims to make 50 percent of its restaurant entrees plant-based by 2025, and 80 percent of them non-red meat (of animals raised for food, cows and pigs are the biggest GHG contributors). The brand’s packaged food will also be 80 percent plant-based within five years.
Ikea’s other not-so-small side hustle is helping eliminate fossil fuels from its retail operations and production: The company is striving for 100 percent renewable energy across its entire value chain by 2030 — including helping secure 100 percent renewable electricity for its nearly 1,600 suppliers. Ikea has been investing in solutions like solar and wind farms around the world since 2009. Its clean energy portfolio now includes 547 wind turbines and two solar farms in 14 countries, and more than 920,000 solar panels on the roofs of Ikea stores and warehouses.
Last year, for the first time, Ingka Group generated more renewable energy — by a third — than it consumed globally in retail and distribution operations.
“Ikea is very much ahead of the curve in retail,” said Winston. “They were one of the biggest renewable energy purchasers before the big tech companies started their buying sprees.”
Widening the circle
In order to realize its vision of becoming 100 percent circular by 2030 — eliminating waste by keeping materials and finished products in use — Ikea must not only make products out of recycled and recyclable materials, but also convince its hundreds of millions of customers to recycle or reuse them.
“A truly circular economy approach is going to have to deal with end of life of products in a totally revolutionary way compared with their current business model,” said ecological economist Tim Jackson, author of the upcoming book “Post Growth: Life After Capitalism.”
The company is exploring how to entice customers to do their part.
During its #BuyBackFriday campaign late last year — conceived as an alternative to traditional Black Friday marketing blitzes — Ikea stores in 27 countries offered to buy back and resell thousands of used home furnishings. Customers received vouchers worth between 30 percent and 50 percent of their item’s original price, depending on its condition. (Anything that couldn’t be resold was recycled or donated to COVID-19 community outreach projects.) Down the road, as the company develops its methods, a bought-back chair could be stripped to its frame, polished, painted, and reshaped into a new chair.
Ikea is turning their “as-is” sections — where last year, 30.5 million discontinued and seasonal items, floor samples and customer returns were sold at discounted prices — into “circular hubs.” Customers can bargain hunt for second hand furnishings while picking up tips on fixing, cleaning or hacking their Ikea products. There are plans to launch hubs in half of Ikea’s stores by the end of the year.
Ikea’s first entirely secondhand store, a six-month test project, debuted in Eskilstuna, Sweden, last November.
“The perception of Ikea as a mass producer of stuff that doesn’t last very long has probably been its biggest Achilles’ heel,” Winston said. “This relatively new effort to change the lifecycle of their products by refurbishing, reselling, or entirely recycling them is probably one of the most important things that they’re doing.”
Jackson put a fine point on it: “#BuyBackFriday was a symbolic gesture. It needs to be an everyday reality.”
Cook says Ikea’s challenge “is to make sustainable living mainstream.” The company has had some past success. Back in 2015, when the most popular alternatives to inefficient incandescent light bulbs were halogens and compact fluorescent lamps, Ikea switched all its lighting products to light-emitting diodes (LEDs), believing that it could build an economy of scale and make LEDs a commercial success. The bulbs sold for about $7 at the time; they now cost less than $1 each and Ikea sold 56 million of them in 2019.
“In general, we are always trying to support the education of our customers [on] how to live a more sustainable and a healthier life at home,” Keesson said.
It’s reasonable to question how any company with a business model based on selling more and more stuff can expand in a truly sustainable way. Some argue that with a burgeoning global middle class on the rise and eager to spend their disposable income, we need companies that will make the effort to stay within the limits of what the planet can provide.
On October 20, 2020, the US Department of Justice filed an antitrust action against Google, the first step in what might be one of the biggest anti-monopoly cases of this century. With Google controlling more than an 87% share of the U.S. search market and its parent company, Alphabet, now one of the largest and most valuable companies in history, the move is likely long overdue. Yet Google/Alphabet is not alone. Just weeks later, the European Commission formally accused Amazon of breaking EU antitrust rules by distorting competition in online retail markets.
At this point, it is relatively uncontroversial to point out that “Big Tech” giants like Google and Amazon increasingly dominate our economies and wield tremendous influence over our culture, social interactions, and political systems.
