IKEA and the Forest Stewardship Council: “Don’t believe the greenwashing”
Part II: How IKEA hides behind FSC and has still consumed illegal timber.
A recent documentary on Arte revealed the serious impact that the world’s largest consumer of timber, IKEA, has on forests around the world.
Of course, you wouldn’t know anything about these impacts from looking at IKEA’s website which tells us that,
At IKEA, we believe we can accomplish more by working together. For many years, we have been committed to working together with different stakeholders to protect and strengthen the world’s forests. One of our key partners is the Forest Stewardship Council® (FSC®) – an organisation that brings together different voices that represent a wide range of needs for responsible forest management. IKEA was one of several founders in 1994.
IKEA told the Arte documentary team that its forestry operations are inspected by the Forest Stewardship Council, which found “no irregularities”.
The documentary shows FSC publicity materials that make the claim that FSC certification can “ensure that the wood used to make your furniture has not harmed the planet”. And that,
“FSC helps protect the world’s forests and the people, plants and animals that live in them, by ensuring that FSC-certified forests are managed according to strict and responsible management standards.”
“But what is this certificate worth,” the Arte documentary asks, “that the Swedish giant relies on?”
A quick history of FSC
The documentary reports that FSC was founded following the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, the UN Conference on Environment and Development. At the conference, the UN approved a declaration on forest management principles.
And after the conference, environmental NGOs began to consider a label for sustainable forestry.
A more detailed history is available in this 2002 report published by Rainforest Foundation UK, “Trading in Credibility: The myth and reality of the Forest Stewardship Council”. The report also includes nine case studies that highlight the problems with the FSC.
The Arte documentary team interviews Simon Counsell, one of the founding members of FSC and former director of Rainforest Foundation UK.
Counsell describes the beginnings of the FSC as follows:
“At the beginning, it was very much environmentalists, a very small group of us, like a handful of us environmentalists, from Friends of the Earth and the Worldwide Fund for Nature.
“But then we realised that we’d have to bring industry people into this in order to understand the market and to see what their kind of requirements would be. So this is when the likes of the big timber companies and IKEA started coming on board with the idea that this certification scheme called the Forest Stewardship Council could be a way to show that they were trying to source more sustainably produced timber.
“It was essentially to diffuse some of the kind of grassroots activism, the protests, the boycotts, and the bad press they were getting.”
Within the FSC, tensions rose between NGOs and the forest industry representatives. Counsell explains that,
“Probably the most serious of these was a conflict of interest right at the heart of the organisation. And that was principally that the certifiers, they are being paid directly by the client companies that want to obtain the certificate. So there’s a vested interest on the part of the certification auditors to issue certificates, to ignore any problems or diminish problems.
“And that’s why companies that we assessed to be absolutely non-compliant with the FSC’s criteria were still being awarded certificates.”
Several of the founding NGOs have left the FSC. IKEA has stayed.
FSC-Watch
Simon Counsell, together with me, runs the website FSC-Watch. We set up the website out of concern about the erosion of FSC’s reliability and credibility.
In the Arte documentary, Counsell says that,
“So after we established the FSC-Watch website more than 20 years ago, we compiled dozens, scores of cases of companies being certified that should not have been certified. And the FSC just didn’t respond. It would cover up. It would delay. It would take temporary actions, but it would almost never take the action of actually stopping the certificate.
“The appearance is that it has really simply become a marketing mechanism for the timber industry.”
FSC told the Arte documentary team that strict rules govern its certification system and that “impartiality is one of its fundamental principles”.
More than 20 years after the Rainforest Foundation UK report raised the issue of the conflict of interest at the heart of the organisation, as well as the many failures to uphold FSC’s own standards, FSC continues to pretend that the problems just don’t exist.
IKEA and illegal timber
While IKEA claims that its timber comes from forests that are responsibly managed, the company repeatedly refused to allow Arte’s documentary team to investigate its supply chains.
An IKEA promotional video shown in the documentary features Mikail Tarasov, sitting in a forest. Tarasov says that,
“Forestry is not rocket science. It is way more complex than that. It’s important to not harvest all the mature trees, but to leave some of them to become really old trees and then to become dead trees to provide food and shelter for the insects, birds, plants, and fungi to support biodiversity.”
Lina Burnelius is project leader and international coordinator, of the Swedish NGO Protect the Forest. She comments that,
“I find it a little bit remarkable how expertly the company paints a perfect green picture about themselves on sustainability and responsibility, because they’re really good at portraying themselves like that. And then you ask for a little bit of traceability and silence. If you have nothing to hide, why can’t you show your supply chain? It’s that simple.”
Unfortunately, one of the key people involved in both FSC and IKEA doesn’t appear in the documentary.
During the 1990s, Steve Howard worked with WWF and was chair of the UK Forest Stewardship Council.
He subsequently founded The Climate Group, one of the organisations that set up Verra, the Washington DC-based carbon certifying company that was on the receiving end of serious criticism last year. Following the criticism, the director of Verra, David Antonioli, announced his resignation. But the organisation denies that the criticisms are valid.
Howard is now Vice Chair Sustainability at the Singaporean state-owned investment company Temasek.
For six years, from 2011 to 2017, Howard was Chief Sustainability Officer at IKEA.
In 2013, he gave a TED Talk titled “Let’s go all-in on selling sustainability”. In his talk, Howard made no mention of over-consumption. Or of IKEA’s endless growth. Or of the fact that IKEA’s supply chains are non-transparent.
Instead, here’s what Howard says about IKEA’s timber supply:
So, wood. We know, with forestry, it’s a choice, you know. You’ve got illegal logging and deforestation, still on a very large scale. Or you can have fantastic responsible forestry that we can be proud of. It’s a simple choice.
So we’ve worked for many years with the Forest Stewardship Council, with literally hundreds of other organisations. And there’s a point here about collaboration. So hundreds of others, of NGOs, of forest workers unions, and of businesses, have helped create the Forest Stewardship Council, which sets standards for forestry and then checks the forestry is good on the ground.
Now, together, through our supply chain, with partners, we’ve managed to certify 35 million hectares of forestry. That’s about the size of Germany. And we’ve decided in the next three years we will double the volume of certified material we put through our business.
So be decisive on these issues. Use your supply chain to drive good.
The reality is that IKEA cannot even keep illegal timber out of its non-transparent supply chain. And Howard’s idea of “responsible forestry that we can be proud of” is pure fantasy, certainly as far as IKEA’s supply chain is concerned.
John Stenebo, former assistant to Ingvar Kamprad, IKEA’s founder, tells us in the documentary that IKEA uses the cheapest timber it can possibly find to keep consumer prices low. “You need to turn a blind eye. You need to start logging pristine forests, because those are the ones still standing,” he says.
Stenebo describes how, during the 1990s, illegal timber entered IKEA’s supply chain:
“In the time I worked with IKEA, they started to source huge amounts of wood from Siberia, taking it illegally through China. The Chinese economy was expanding immensely in those days and needed all the domestic timber. And they had reached a point where there were no forests available any longer. Everything was logged, apart from protected areas. So, for the IKEA suppliers in China, for the production facilities, they came up with the idea to channel wood from Siberia through northern China to the Chinese furniture factories. This couldn’t be done in any legal way.”
IKEA responded to the Arte documentary team that it “has never accepted illegal wood in its supply chain at any point in its history”.
The documentary highlights two examples of illegal timber in IKEA’s supply chain.
In 2011, IKEA was involved in the controversial logging of one of the last primary forests in Russia:
In 2020, research by the UK-based NGO Earthsight revealed that IKEA suppliers were clearing ancient forests in Ukraine:
“That’s the nature of the beast,” Stenebo says. “If you want those volumes of wood, at such low price points, you have to do that. It’s inevitable.”
Later in the documentary he says,
“So I think as a consumer, don’t believe the greenwashing. And with greenwashing I mean they are trying to create an image that they care so much about the environment. They don’t.”
Naturally, the big certification orgs are captured by industry, such is the case in every govt agency, and with the fossil fuel companies at the IPCC COP “climate” meetings. To be on board (and literally, on the boards of directors), industry requires the major voice, the majority vote, or they would simply bypass that org and start their own! If environmentalists and NGOs want any say at all, they must agree to be marginalized and co-opted to stay in the loop at all. Same goes for the supposed fishery certification orgs. In forestry, clear-cuts make the most profit, so they clear-cut. And if they leave a token tree standing, it will certainly fail with no protection from what used to surround it. Then all the biodiversity is lost, soil ruined by machinery, water cycle destroyed, etc. When you go in an IKEA store (shopping mall?) it is like entering a pavilion at a major world fair. One door in, and a vast winding labyrinth of displays before you get to the exit. Then the fake Swedish tokenism of the dining room. A joyous celebration of consumerism. Remember - for every “clean” place, somewhere there is an equally dirty one (or worse). And thank you, Simon Counsell, for taking a stand!