If you live in Sydney, Australia, and want to get rid of an old Ikea chair or bookcase, you can take it back to your local Ikea store, which will buy it back from you and resell it to help it avoid ending up in a landfill. The program, along with programs for furniture leasing that the brand is expanding globally this year, is a part of of Ikea’s broader strategy to become climate positive—meaning it reduces more greenhouse gas emissions than its entire value chain creates—in only a decade.

Hitting the climate positive goal will mean transforming every part of the business, including the way it designs products, the energy used in suppliers’ factories, and how customers use products that are often seen as disposable today. Those changes will have to happen quickly. “I think their timing is very aggressive,” says Mark Griffiths, the global leader of the Climate Business Hub at the nonprofit WWF, which is working with Ikea on its environmental strategy. “It’s a decade away, and if you think about how big that company is, and how many suppliers they have, and what they need to do, it’s a huge mountain to climb.”

In late 2019, the Inter Ikea Group, the company that controls the Ikea brand, announced that it was investing 200 million Euros to accelerate the move to become climate positive by 2030. The company recognizes that this level of transformation is necessary. “The ambitions and commitments are quite bold, but it’s based on the science,” says Lena Pripp Kovac, chief sustainability officer at the Inter Ikea Group.

Read the full article about Ikea going green by Adele Peters at Fast Company.