It could be viewed as an investment to hedge upcoming inflation?
IKEA buys 11,000 acres of U.S. forest to keep it from being developed
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Re: IKEA buys 11,000 acres of U.S. forest to keep it from being developed
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
Forests are not perpetual carbon sinks, as trees eventually die and then decompose, releasing their carbon back into the atmosphere. At best, a young and growing forest can be a temporary carbon sink, until it reaches maturity (and steady state). Alternatively, a forest might support continual carbon sinking if and only if the recently dead and/or mature trees were somehow harvested and treated/stored in such a way t…
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.
Broadly speKing, it is - coal does not really form on the timelines relevant to human civilisation
Re: IKEA buys 11,000 acres of U.S. forest to keep it from being developed
#33Ikea has been buying large pieces of land in rainforest for years. Why? It can come in handy one day to be able to break the newspapers about how Ikea is saving the rainforest. Especially if shit hits the fan and the newspapers starts publishing bad news about Ikea.
Re: IKEA buys 11,000 acres of U.S. forest to keep it from being developed
#34How much would buying all the Brazilian rain forest cost the world, or even renting it from Brazil? We would need it to be slightly more than cattle farming to work... but I’d happily pay towards this.
well, in first place Brazil (or Peru, Suriname, etc) should be wanting to sell or rent it. Which they aren't. Second, it won't help to buy or rent it if there is no control in the region. Third, Europe together with China are the biggest market of illegal wood. France has a high military presence on the French Guyana, and they could definitely pass intelligence to some navy to catch the boats leaving Brazil/Suriname towards Europe. So it's not matter of who owns it but if all nations actually want to fight the black market around illegal wood and biopiracy, which they clearly don't want.
References:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-brazil-biopiracy/brazil-t...
https://www.dw.com/en/wood-laundering-brings-illegal-amazon-...
Re: IKEA buys 11,000 acres of U.S. forest to keep it from being developed
#35Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games also own forests to keep them from being chopped down!
Re: IKEA buys 11,000 acres of U.S. forest to keep it from being developed
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 think this is not as easy a calculus as one might imagine. Heirloom furniture is in some ways less sustainable than Ikea products. I am not sure there would be enough sustainable hardwood in the world to meet demand at the scale of Ikea. People have different furniture needs than they did decades ago, and in terms of weight, logistics, material use, Ikea are quite efficient.
The complication is EXACTLY why we need to be even more in panic and hair-on-fire about environmental issues. A colleague did some analyses for the life cycle emissions of refrigerants. The complexity in the process was absurd, and basically intractable without simplifications. How much indirect CO2 emissions are caused by an inefficient compressor? How much does it depend on how you generate electricity? Which country were the gaskets manufactured in? What was the process used to extract the rare earths? Everything depends on everything else and consequences are pretty unknown.
Re: IKEA buys 11,000 acres of U.S. forest to keep it from being developed
#37How much would buying all the Brazilian rain forest cost the world, or even renting it from Brazil? We would need it to be slightly more than cattle farming to work... but I’d happily pay towards this.
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…
But they weren't suggesting individual purchases. A very large group doing a very large purchase can buy cost-effective security.
Re: IKEA buys 11,000 acres of U.S. forest to keep it from being developed
#38the forest was bought by IKEA as part of a strategy to reduce more carbon than it creates through its value chain They might want to write that into their books, but note that by buying an existing forest, no additional CO2 reduction is achieved on a global scale.
Unless they plan on cutting the forest down, replanting everything anew and BURYING the chopped wood, they are not really helping. CO2 already in trees doesn't quickly return to the atmosphere if wood is used for long lasting things. Now, IKEA is known to do the opposite...
I know it's counter-intuitive, but it's *almost* better for the environment to NOT recycle paper and bury it in landfills. We're essentially reversing the process of extracting oil.
Re: IKEA buys 11,000 acres of U.S. forest to keep it from being developed
#39This 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…
> This smells like some really bold and really ridiculous PR attempt.
Of course it is, they just use illegal loggers in Romania to offset their actual need for the crappy disposable stuff they produce. They seem to get away with that no problem, despite EU restrictions on it.
I've never seen the appeal of IKEA when it came to furniture, the long lines at some of the bigger ones I've been to (for breakfast) are baffling and you'd think they were giving the stuff away given how long some people would wait to get in. It all looks and feels so cheap, it looks like what they use when staging a home for sale or what a cheap studio set looks like for a 1 shot scene in a movie.
IKEA had to settle so many wrongful infant deaths in the US, something that arguably could have been prevented by the parents, but it doesn't undo the fact that it comes down to a sub-standard QC/QA practices and literately no engineering in their design team. But, IKEA (now a Dutch company not Swedish despite its branding) is the China of furniture and focuses on that business model: cheap, disposable items that are profitable only at immense scale.
> Well, just because they're producing something useful doesn't mean they can't give back at the same time! Small changes add up.
Ha, useful... I'm guessing you've never lived near a University. the amount of IKEA crap that shows up in the dumpsters near off campus apartments at the end of the term is enough to make you forget about the word 'useful' when describing IKEA ever again. I've spent most of my time near Universities in the US, and its always the same crap littering the area after finals. The cheap plywood gets warped if it snows outside so most of its damaged beyond repair for even 2nd hand use. I wanted some night stands to use as in the garage for my tools once when I was in HS and was willing to do some repair work, but after dragging the thing a block it literately fell apart and the plywood had disintegrated and warped beyond use.
Re: IKEA buys 11,000 acres of U.S. forest to keep it from being developed
#40This 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…
There are some serious allegations that Ikea sources illegally harvested wood and convinces regulatora to look the other way
https://fsc-watch.com/2020/07/02/ikeas-ukrainian-illegal-tim...