29
votes
IKEA has been accused of contributing to the rapid deterioration of Romania's biologically rich forests – campaigners say suppliers benefitting from corrupt environment in the country
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- Title
- What is IKEA doing to Romania's ancient forests?
- Published
- Jun 9 2024
- Word count
- 1316 words
Ugh this one hurts. I really like IKEA. I thought we as a society had the growth/cut/replant system down and protected old growth forests.
I highly recommend the Pulitzer prize winning novel The Overstory to anyone who wants to read a fascinating and creative story about people and trees. I learned so much it changed the way I see the world.
I see this is a bit of an older topic, not sure why it's popped up on my feed today, but here's a bit of context from my part of the world.
I'm in Canada, a country with a large reforestation industry.. to illustrate, a very well-regarded person in in the Canadian reforestation field estimated (in a casual forum chat a number of years ago) that Canada actively planted 600,000,000 trees/year on top of any natural regeneration. This number is likely lower now (people I know still in the industry are seeing fewer contracts to go around the past couple of years), but still well in the hundreds of millions. I don't know the exact history of this field, but many decades for sure.. long enough that older planted areas to be harvestable for sure.
And yet, despite this, proper old growth forest is still being harvested at an alarming rate in Canada. This doesn't shock me in the least.