161–170 of 622 posts
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Everytime I hear the word 'carbon capture' I just think of trees. This is literally what trees do, they capture carbon.
And then release a large majority of it when they die and are eaten by fungus and bacteria. https://www.sciencenewsforstudents.org/article/recycling-dea...
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It's because they're fighting the arguably true reality that the majority of their furniture is designed to be disposable, and consumers are generally fine with that. I'd like to be wrong, though until we require companies to be responsible for all costs associated with the full lifecycle of a product so externalized costs are incorporated, we're not going to develop the most sustainable practices.
I've been using a lot of IKEA furniture for many years, some new, some secondhand (sometimes I'm the third or fourth owner) and I must say they're quite durable unlike some of the new furniture I've bought over the year and had to throw away.
I cannot confirm that IKEA furniture is not durable. It's mostly not hardwood, yes! Of course if you're not careful you can rip out a screw. But that screw or that board is usually easily replaced. And of course, IKEA also has cheaper and more expensive models, models that are not very robust, and models that are.
I have a problem with IKEA. Aren't those peaces of furniture made of composite materials and those not so sturdy shelves a sustainability problem when compared to traditional furniture making which is mostly wood glue a protective coat which lasts for hundreds of years can be infinitely repaired in a workshop with some basic tools. And then it it all ends it can became firewood, which ikea furniture can't. Shouldn't…
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The annoying thing about IKEA furniture, and that from competitors, is that all it takes is for a tiny piece of particle board to be damaged internally for the whole item to be useless. Generally, while they are in one piece and not moved, they are fine. But trasnporting or disassembling this stuff is a risk. The tiny wooden pegs, plastic bits and agressive screws going straight into soft board can rip out chunks, sn…
Ikea sells replacement parts online. Usually, all you need is their number code which you can find in the manual (or if your lost that in the pdf on their website). I recently ordered a replacement door myself, just to make it look new again.
Coincidentally this appears to be changing as of yesterday - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-55796429
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Ooh and stop mining Bitcoin
But how else will people make money than in a global, decentralized pyramid/MLM scheme?
But I see your point.
We should make a pyramid/MLM scheme where you're promised rewards for planting trees, segregating waste, cleaning up in any potential wildlife habitats, and reducing/reusing stuff in general.
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Is that accurate? I can't believe that decomposition releases _all_ of the carbon into the atmosphere. Certainly a good amount of it is sequestered into the ground (e.g. coal). Thus a standing forest is never completely carbon neutral.
You are a bit out of date on this, wood isn't really turning into coal anymore these days, since bacteria and fungi have developed the ability to decompose lignin 300Ma ago. The only thing comparable these days is peat bogs that act as carbon sinks (because their plant matter does not decompose due to acidic and anaerobic environment).
This smells like some really bold and really ridiculous PR attempt. "Ikea uses about one percent—yes, one percent—of the world's entire commercial wood supply. That amounts to about 17.8 million cubic yards of lumber last year. " [1] I guess they need this PR purchase to appease some eko organization. And this is equally ridiculous. Ikea is making furniture, something people really need. Why they have to explain them…
If we convert that into acres we get... c11k Acres.
So they have bought and protected roughly what they will use across the next year, effectively like an offset.
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This seems a little misleading. 66,000 acres would be 270 sq km, 33% of the country is 22,000 sq km so IKEA owns just over 1% of the forested land. IKEA is the largest private forester but most of Lithuania's forests are owned by the state [0] and overseen by various state bodies, some of whom operate them as commercial concerns including, almost certainly, selling timber to IKEA. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/…
I don't think he means IKEA owns 33% of the forest. 33% is the total percentage of forest and IKEA is the bigger single owner of forests. Two separate statements.
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Buying rain forest would mean nothing for illegal rare wood markets, or illegal gold mining, or illegal forest fires to stretch cattle grazing area. Most people grossly underestimate how wild and pretty much lawless inland rain-forest regions are in the Brazilian state of Amazonas . There are small pockets of settlements everywhere but except for Manaus there is very sparse infrastructure, Police will take days to ge…
> by the time you try to enforce this, the tree would have been fellen, cut, and shipped on a boat to the highest bidder. That could be true, but only holds for one tree (or a small number of trees). The problem starts when people build a business around trees. By the time their businesses are fully operational you can enforce laws. And this makes it unattractive to even start in this line of business.
Even assuming good faith from Brazilian law enforcement/military the remoteness and shear size of the rain forest makes it a huge challenge to enforce any rule of Law.
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I read an article commenting on "microlending", which came to the conclusion that the concept doesn't really work. Your loan of $3.50 might really mean something to the peasant who receives it. But it means nothing to you, and so microloans end up with no one vetting the borrower for creditworthiness or hassling them to collect. This incentive mismatch ends up spoiling the project; there's no reason for someone not t…
I have about usd 100 rotating in different micro loans through https://www.kiva.org/ In 11 years only one loan has defaulted.
A bit more than 300$ went into Kiva donations (you can choose for every loan, to cover administrative costs). 20$ went to currency losses. 80$ went to default losses.
The default losses are 10% of what I put in, or 1.6% of the total amount lent. And I explicitly chose a few loans that were explicitly marked as high-default-risk, because of the social situation of the recipients or due to the political/economic situation in the region.
I cannot confirm that my money dried up in default losses. I still think it's quite a good model (but I haven't followed economic research about microloans in the last few years).
Edit: I grew up in the amazon region, parents worked in an NGO. Giving people gifts/donations is worthless to most, since something gifted feels like it has no value. If you build a water well for free, it will be broken in a few months to years. If you make the village pay a part of the costs on the other hand, and if they must help building it, they'll value it more and keep care of it. It's a cultural thing. I could imagine that loans work the same way: You don't get a donation, you'll get a loan that you have to work for. In that culture, it will be valued more. (Of course, that applies to the region I grew up in, I don't want to over-generalize.)