Soon you might be able to RENT furniture from Ikea
The Scandinavian furniture giant thinks that renting out furniture or offering a buy-back scheme will help reduce waste and increase sustainability
MOVING house usually means buying - and dumping - some Ikea furniture... but that could be about to change.
Conscious of the amount of waste caused by people's (quite literally) throwaway attitude to its products, the Swedish company are considering running a buy back scheme, or even letting people rent items from them.
Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland, IKEA chief executive Jesper Brodin outlined the plans.
He said: "You build in a consciousness with consumers that they don't have to own it, but own this collectively in the world and recycle it.
"In London, for example, there are a lot of people who commute and they are not interested in building a second home, so rental there is more interesting.
"If the last decades were about mass consumerism, now we are getting towards mass circularity."
A similar buy back programme is already being trialled in Japan, where people can sell back their sofas to be recycled.
In Finland, Ikea gives returned furniture items to charities and thanks people for their donations by giving them a gift card.
Furniture recycling is an important issue - the Environmental Protection Agency claims that 9.8 MILLION tonnes of furniture was thrown out in 2009 alone.
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