By wood they mean sawdust of course. The article discusses IKEA’s particle board factory in southern Sweden.
I don’t see this as a problem. We should be thankful IKEA’s particle board furniture is so popular. The alternative would be to sell real furniture with wood veneers. Cherry, Maple, Oak, and other hardwoods. I bet the forest management people are thankful people are happy with particle board covered in plastic laminate.
This is a strange article. WTH would anyone even think IKEA uses illegally logged wood? They aren’t doing mahogany and ebony inlays. They aren’t using any hardwoods at all. Particle board is made from the cheapest and most worthless trees they can find. Doesn’t matter how warped, split, or knotty. The wood chipper turns it into sawdust shavings. Much of this wood would have been useless trash back when furniture was made with hardwood veneers. Particle board is a very efficient building material. There’s almost no waste like there is with traditional lumber.
I wonder how they are recycling the wood? Is there a process to strip off the plastic laminate? Or can the wood chipper handle the boards with the laminate still attached? (i.e. would shredded plastic contaminate the wood shavings).
Seriously? They’re calling the glue vile and revolting?
I expected them to start talking about the suffering of the noble trees as their spirits were crushed in the harsh unforgiving machines made of steel. Steel - the same material used to make guns that kill people.
I need to look through my Nat Geo Magazines for this original article.
I’ve had a subscription for over 25 years. They’ve really started annoying me lately with some of their more extreme Eco articles. If it keeps up then I won’t bother renewing the subscription.
Particle board was originally developed to save trees. All the wasted sawdust from lumber mills and other manufacturing is sold to make particle board. It’s one of our most efficient uses for wood and is sustainable. They use trees that can grow in just a few years, get harvested, and replanted.
That sentence (“After combining the wood with the revolting glue, urea is found in urine, the processed particle boards are loaded onto giant rotating drying racks that can hold 90 of the massive boards, reported National Geographic.”) is nonsensical. What is the meaning of the “urea is found in urine” parenthetical phrase?
You seem to be implying that particle board furniture is inconsistent with the use of hardwood veneers. That’s certainly not true. And hardwood veneers over a particleboard base is probably easier on the environment that using a hardwood slab.
However particle board furniture is a bit questionable from an ecological standpoint because it’s not particularly durable or repairable. Once the veneer is scratched or delaminates, there’s no much the average handyman can do about it. With hardwood, you can always sand and refinish it.
Particle board furniture also doesn’t lend itself to much in the way of creative woodworking, because you can’t rout or shape it easily.
I’m tremendously skeptical of that 1% of the world’s wood figure, unless they qualify it in some way. If you consider construction lumber, wood for paper mills, and fire wood as well as hard woods, I would have guessed IKEA’s share of the market to be a lot smaller.
It’s been 15 or more years since I visited an IKEA. I see a lot of “assemble it yourself” furniture at Walmart and Sams. Have they moved beyond plastic laminate finishes?
I knew particle board was the base under a lot of wood veneer furniture. It’s a good base for that purpose,
Ikea don’t just use particle board you know. There’s plenty of solid timber in their more upmarket products and products that need to be structurally sound such as beds and couches.
According to FAO, “the estimated
annual wood consumption is now around 3.5 billion cubic meters” & “The industrial wood consumption along the last 20 years […] in 2005 achieved around 1.55 billion cubic meters”
The figure quoted in the article is that IKEA uses 17.8M cubic yards which is 13.6M cubic meters. This is a bit less than 0.4% of all wood consumption and a bit less than 1% of industrial wood consumption.
It’s still idiotic; they could write about soup and say “After combining the vegetables with the revolting stock (water is found in urine)…”
Urea’s a nitrogenous chemical compound that happens to be in urine, along with a host of other chemicals. Doesn’t necessarily make it revolting in and of itself.
The article discusses IKEA’s particle board factory in southern Sweden.
They aren’t doing mahogany and ebony inlays. They aren’t using any hardwoods at all. Particle board is made from the cheapest and most worthless trees they can find. Doesn’t matter how warped, split, or knotty. The wood chipper turns it into sawdust shavings. Much of this wood would have been useless trash back when furniture was made with hardwood veneers. Particle board is a very efficient building material. There’s almost no waste like there is with traditional lumber.