Story
Polyester is a durable, wrinkle-resistant and easy-care material that is ideal for many home furnishing products like rugs, pillows, quilts and cushions.
The downside to virgin polyester is that it is made from oil, coal or natural gas. This means that when we use virgin polyester, we are exhausting the planet’s natural resources. Our response to this, is to replace all virgin polyester with recycled in our products.
In 2020, we achieved the milestone of replacing 79% of the virgin polyester used in IKEA textile products and will accelerate the transformation towards the aim of only using recycled polyester throughout the product range where polyester is used.
All children, no matter where they grow up, have similar needs the first years – for example to try out new exciting food and practice their eating skills. A good way to learn is to watch how others do. These insights guided our engineer John Forsén as he developed ANTILOP – a highchair that lets children and their parents spend time together around the dining table. Along the way, John also learned that one way to create affordable furniture that simplifies people’s lives is doing things a bit differently.
IKEA products are normally developed through collaboration between a designer and an engineer – the designer does sketches and the engineer makes constructional drawings. But with ANTILOP, John went straight to creating a computer model.
"I had an idea of how the finished result should look, so I started by calculating where the legs had to be, and at what angle, to get a safe and stable construction", he explains.
A smart construction led to a low price
Virgin vs recycled polyester
Originally, all polyester was made from oil-based raw materials which are not renewable but we are switching to only using recycled polyester. The good thing is that polyester can be recycled over and over, without negatively affecting the quality of our products.
When we make products from recycled polyester, we give a second life to material that is not biodegradable and reduce the amount that may otherwise end up in landfill or the ocean. Instead, PET and other sources of polyester are used to make textiles, storage boxes, kitchen fronts and even lamps.
Recycled polyester is just as good as virgin polyester in terms of looks, quality and function, and produces about 50% less in CO2 emissions. And the material is just as clean and safe in every way.
To get a low price, a simple construction was needed.
"I focused on the necessities. ANTILOP is optimised to be strong and easy to manufacture. The fact that we use plastic and steel, and very little of it, enabled the low price", says John.
The construction also makes it easy to bring the chair with you whenever it's mealtime out of the home. Or have an extra chair waiting at the grandparents when the grownups are out for dinner on their own.
A low price, but not at any cost
Some challenges with recycled polyester
But the definition of good furniture covers more than a low price. The quality has to be there, too. And it is. We take the toughest demands in each region and by regular quality and safety inspections we make sure ANTILOP lives up to all of them. If a new law or standard is introduced we test the chair again.
All in all, ANTILOP shows that doing things differently when creating good furniture can be just the way to do it.
Recycled polyester makes us less dependent on oil. The amount we convert, is equal to the amount of virgin fossil fuel we eliminate from our polyester raw material (this excludes potential dyeing and other post recycled polyester production treatments).
With some exceptions, the challenge is not the conversion of polyester into recycled itself, but to make it available to everyone by keeping it affordable. Buying low environmental impact products often comes with a higher price tag. We want to change that by working to make recycled polyester products more affordable and accessible to the many people.
Only recycled polyester
IKEA is committed to end the dependency on virgin fossil materials and only use renewable or recycled materials by 2030.
We are accelerating this movement for polyester in our range and aim to replace all virgin polyester in our textile products with recycled. In 2020, IKEA replaced 79% of the virgin polyester used in IKEA textile products with recycled polyester. In volume, this means we converted 130,000 metric tonnes of recycled polyester, and saved 200,000 tonnes of virign polyester.
We haven’t reached our 100% goal yet, but we have come far and overcome many obstacles on the way. These volumes make us a leader in converting to recycled polyester and we hope that our decisions can inspire and motivate whole industries to change.
Responsible sourcing
At IKEA, we demand that all recycled polyester used in IKEA products shall come from recyclers that are compliant with the Global Recycled Standard and traceability is secured to the IKEA product through requirements toward the IKEA Suppliers.
By only using recycled polyester that meets the Global Recycled Standards we manage to secure social, environmental and chemical practices at the recycler’s production. We believe that the GRS standard is the best standard on the market today. We work with our partners and textile organisations such as Textile Exchange to further improve standards on recycled materials, including traceability of material beyond the recycling units.
