IKEA’s Latest Climate Target: Glue
The furniture group has spent more than a decade working to replace a fossil-based glue that represents 5% of its global carbon footprint
3 min
Swedish furniture brand IKEA is switching to a new glue to help meet its climate goals, underscoring how small changes can make a measurable impact.
Inter IKEA—which owns the IKEA brand, develops its products and manages its supply chain—said around 5% of its value chain’s carbon footprint comes from fossil-based glue in its particle-and-fiber boards, used in products such as cupboards, wardrobes and shelves. It said Wednesday that it is aiming to eliminate 40% of its fossil-based glue in the boards by fiscal 2030, which could cut its greenhouse-gas emissions by 1.5 percentage points, depending on future business growth.
A factory in Kazlu Ruda, Lithuania will be the first to use a biobased glue made from corn in industrial plants rather than the food chain. IKEA is also trialing other biobased glues. The changes are part of IKEA’s efforts to meet its goal to use only renewable or recycled materials by fiscal 2030.
“It’s not an easy transformation. We are talking about the industry using the same glues for 60 years and that glue has been optimized for performance and cost for 60 years,” said Venla Hemmilä, material and technology engineer at IKEA of Sweden.
IKEA began searching for alternatives to fossil-based glue more than a decade ago, but found lower carbon, biobasedoptions were too expensive and the industry wasn’t well prepared to supplythem. Today, there is still a premium for biobased glues but it isn’t expected to be passed onto shoppers and should come down as production scales up.
The company expects biomaterials to become more cost competitive with fossil-based materials in the coming years. IKEA hopes its manufacturing footprint will accelerate that cost reduction of greener alternatives and that other companies will follow its lead. It declined to provide the names of the green glue suppliers for competitive reasons.
Glue became a focus for the group after 2016. That year IKEA examined how its climate goals aligned with the Paris Agreement and charted how they could expand the business while cutting their emissions, said Andreas Rangel Ahrens, head of climate at Inter IKEA Group.
“It is so easy to set goals, but how do you actually understand the impact and what to drive?,” Mr. Rangel Ahrens said.
To address that challenge, Mr. Rangel Ahrens said IKEA carried out a breakdown analysis of the sources of its carbon footprint, including production, materials and food. It also enlisted consultants to conduct life-cycle assessments of certain materials. In the 2022 financial year, IKEA said 52% of its emissions came from the materials in its products, the next highest contribution was 14% from people using its products at home, followed by production, which was responsible for around 8%.
Companies often use spending metrics, such as purchased goods, to calculate the carbon footprint of their materials. Instead, Mr. Rangel Ahrens said IKEA uses weight because it allows them to measure changes in a material, such as recycled and renewable content.
For example, when IKEA looked at its particle-and-fiber boards, it estimated the emissions coming from transport, forestry and energy, among other areas. It discovered around half of the material’s emissions were from the glue used to bind the wood chips and fibers together, meaning that fossil-based glue was responsible for about 5% of IKEA’s carbon footprint, Mr. Rangel Ahrens said.
This detailed approach to break down a product’s footprint allows sustainability teams to identify specific areas for other parts of the business to work on. “We are not just telling them you should reduce emissions from suppliers by 80% and go fish,” Mr. Rangel Ahrens said. We tell them where to focus and then they actually know what to do rather than just getting a very ambitious goal dropped on their laps, he said.
The company has also reduced emissionswith other targeted changes, including plant-based meatballs, a bookcase that uses paper foil instead of veneer, and switching to LED lightbulbs. It is also exploring how to add biobased content into coatings.
“It’s very important for us that sustainability is not a luxury for the few. It needs to be available also for people with thin wallets,” Mr. Rangel Ahrens said.
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Randy Boyagoda’s new novel, “Lords of Serendipity,” delivers a biting satire of cheating, politics and dysfunction across modern universities.
5 min
Administrative cowardice. Rampant cheating. The soaking and scamming of undergrads and grad students. Performative wokeism. Intensifying competition for international tuition dollars from an expansive China.
These are either the latest dire headlines about American higher ed or the myriad subplots of “Lords of Serendipity,” an ambitious new novel by Randy Boyagoda. Unlike most campus fiction, its scope extends well beyond the cloister of the liberal arts classroom to whammy the entire university system, from its financial model to its function within a globalized economy. Along the way, it skewers its lightning-rod targets with a precision too sharp to be considered entirely fictional.
That its author is not only well-versed in satire, having written four other novels in the genre, but is also a professor of English at the University of Toronto and an experienced college administrator, further blurs the lines between comic fiction and brutal fact. It’s the kind of no-holds-barred book only a consummate insider would know to write—but only one who is also conveniently outside the American university system could get away with writing.
“This is someone who’s got the inside dope on what can go on at universities, especially with international students, and what kind of con games are going on,” said Margaret Atwood, a friend and fellow Torontonian.
The novel, like Boyagoda himself, is often very funny—even as the dilemmas its characters face read as tragedy. Its cast includes the bickering members of a Sri Lankan hotel cleaner’s family, insecure American freshmen, dead-end third-tier college professors and their highflying Ivy League counterparts and dispirited university functionaries. An old-fashioned Dickensian tale, it sweeps across continents and campuses, from a classic liberal-arts college to a stand-in for Harvard University to an urban technical school to the dilapidated buildings of a state-run university in Sri Lanka.
“I’m a joyful person,” Boyagoda said in an interview, though he prefers to see his outlook on academia as “hopeful” rather than optimistic. He smiles and laughs frequently. He bikes everywhere. He derives energy from his students and from his four daughters, ages 14 to 20. They help him and his American wife, Anna, also an educator, care for Boyagoda’s father, an immigrant from Sri Lanka who has dementia and lives with the family.
The germ of the novel came to Boyagoda during the pandemic, when he was serving as a vice-dean. An urban legend was circulating about a statistics grad student selling passing grades to international students. The cheating scheme itself may well have been apocryphal, but it felt tantalizingly plausible.
“As a novelist, it stayed with me,” Boyagoda said. “Who would sell grades for a stats course? Why would someone buy grades? What’s motivating them? Why wouldn’t the university be doing something about it?” What he didn’t want to do, he explained, was write “another novel about a creative writing professor and his drama with students.”
In addition to writing novels—the first of which was a finalist for Canada’s prestigious Giller Prize; he’s written eight books in total—Boyagoda teaches literature full-time. For his students next semester, kids raised in a purportedly “post-literature era,” he’s assigning three 700-page novels, he noted mischievously, books by George Eliot, Ralph Ellison and Kiran Desai.
On RateMyProfessors, students remark on Boyagoda’s heavy assignments, tough grading and distaste for cellphones, but also hail his “comedy.” When alerted to these reviews, Boyagoda laughed. “Guilty as charged,” he said.
“Randy’s one of those people in academia who is very well educated but doesn’t have an ounce of superiority about him,” said John Irving, who frequently guest lectures in Boyagoda’s classroom. “It’s amazing to see how willing students are to talk in his classrooms, how little afraid they feel of being mocked or put down—he gets complete candor out of them.”
Negotiating competing interests seems to come naturally to him. Like many college campuses, after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, the University of Toronto was embroiled in protests, encampments and discord; part of the school’s response was to convene a working group on civil discourse. Boyagoda was put in charge, serving for two years. It’s the kind of thankless task many professors would flee from, but Boyagoda relished the prospect and thinks the group, which is ongoing, made progress.
He has since pivoted to another formidable academic concern: the waning prestige of the humanities. In July, Boyagoda became the director of the Jackman Humanities Institute and special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science. This fall, he is starting a series of gatherings he calls the Dead Book Club. (Dead writers feature heavily among his favorites: St. Augustine, Dante, William Faulkner, Evelyn Waugh, Saul Bellow.)
“The goal is to encourage students to read for its own sake and have conversation for its own sake,” Boyagoda said. “The importance of the humanities will be revealed to those who participate.”
“Lords of Serendipity,” which publishes next week, reflects Boyagoda’s commitment to the pursuit of knowledge: “I’m supposed to say I learn more from my students than they do from me, but no,” Boyagoda said. “I enjoy sharing my excitement and joy about literature and ideas. There are these moments when you are teaching and you can see someone’s face change because they didn’t know something and then they did. That moment when you’re actually watch someone enlarge themselves is deeply satisfying.”
In literary circles, Boyagoda is often referred to as a Catholic novelist, a description he embraces. “A novelist willing to give shape and voice to contemporary religious experience is needed,” Boyagoda said. “I understand myself as a Catholic novelist, provided that I’m not only a Catholic novelist, I’m also a South Asian novelist and I’m a Canadian novelist. I don’t want to be captive to one label.”
His characters, he said, are subjected to what he calls “Graham Greene character situations.”
“They are trying to do good in a fallen world and realize the most they can do is less harm than someone else would do in that same role,” he explained. “They have to accept they are complicit in something that provides some good thing to others. It’s a very Graham Greene way of thinking about sacrifice.”
The campus green they inhabit is a febrile zone in which lofty ideals and cynicism regularly collide. It’s a place where a traditional holiday college celebration is now an occasion for political protest. Kids freely police one another inside and out of the classroom with social media their constant, ready weapon of choice. International students, knowing their family’s financial futures hinge on their degrees, operate in terror of failure and deportation.
Early readers of the book include Gary Shteyngart and Junot Diaz, both of whom have taught at universities and written comic novels. They each contacted Boyagoda midway through to say, in essence, “You nailed it.”
As biting as “Lords of Serendipity” can be, Boyagoda’s faith in higher education remains undaunted.
“It’s absurd that we live in societies that make the decision to take people between the ages of 18 and 22, when they are most physically capable of contributing to our nations and communities, and tell them, ‘Go away for four years, and read and learn and have conversations,’” he said. “I want students to be aware of what an incredible privilege that is.”
Corrections & Amplifications
Randy Boyagoda is a special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science at the University of Toronto. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said he is a special adviser to the dean of humanities. (Corrected on Sept. 2)
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