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Opinion: IKEA is the 'least sustainable retailer on the planet'

July 26, 2009

Ellen Ruppel Shell, contributing editor to The Atlantic and author of "Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture," has published a scathing indictment of popular retailer IKEA in the latest issue of The Atlantic.

She notes that from a branding standpoint, IKEA "passes as the anti-Wal-Mart: a company where value and good values coexist." But the products at IKEA are so inexpensive, she says, that consumers are more likely to throw them away than fix them when they break (and broken particleboard is nearly impossible to fix, anyway).

The result, she says, is a retailer where "an item's price reflects only a fraction of its societal costs." And she echoes the words of an environmental activist who calls IKEA "the least sustainable retailer on the planet."

IKEA designs to price, challenging its talented European team to create ever-cheaper objects, and its suppliers—most of them in low-wage countries in Asia and eastern Europe—to squeeze out the lowest possible price. By some measures the world's third-largest wood consumer, IKEA proudly employs 15 "forestry monitors." Eight of them work in China and Russia, but illegal logging is widespread in those vast countries, making it impossible to guarantee that all wood is legally harvested. (The company declines to pay a premium to ensure that all timber is legally harvested, citing costs that would be passed along to the consumer.)