People who don’t like IKEA kitchen cabinets often say that they aren’t made of “real wood,” but rather medium-density fiberboard (MDF).
Wait a minute. You are buying solid wood furniture that will last for generations. It will cost more, even though it will last longer and look better. You may have heard that solid wood furniture was made with some plywood. Can this happen? Is that right? What is really going on?
Most of the furniture at IKEA is made of white, smooth particleboard. The furniture made from this wood is lighter than furniture made from solid wood because it is not as thick. There are two types of particle boards: those that are extruded and those that are platen pressed.
Wood veneer is a thin piece of wood that is used to cover things like particleboard and MDF. Because of this, the composite material looks cleaner and more elegant than real wood, but it costs less.
People think that solid wood products are better than engineered wood products. Solid woods are stable, strong, and last a long time. IKEA uses many different kinds of hard and soft woods, such as:
IKEA sells many different kinds of wood. The best-known thing from IKEA is its furniture, which is mostly made of compressed wood chips sandwiched between layers of plastic veneer. Even so, IKEA has a wide range of solid wood products made from pine, oak, birch, beech, or acacia. IKEA can now be made of real wood because of this.
Particle board is used as the base for laminates and veneers at IKEA and other stores. It is easy, cheap, and looks good. If you take care of it and keep it in good shape, it will live for a long time. But, unlike a real wood table, it can’t be fixed easily if it gets broken. On the other hand, a professional would probably charge the same amount to fix it as it would cost to buy a new table at IKEA.
Most customers don’t mind that IKEA furniture is made of particle board or wood because it is cheap and can be put together in many different ways.
Fiberboard furniture will never last as long as solid wood furniture. Hardwoods like oak or acacia are best, but a softwood like Swedish pine will do. If you can’t afford to spend more on the material, think about putting in a better part.
My husband and I went to IKEA after our honeymoon to get some basic furniture. We went in because of the prices, but I soon found out that almost nothing is made of real wood. Everything is made of particle board, with a few exceptions that are all made of pine, which is the cheapest wood.
Ikea is a huge company. Ikea, which uses 1% of the world’s wood, says that the 530 million cubic feet of wood it needs to make furniture every year pulls with a strange kind of twisted gravity. Many people find that a trip to the big blue-and-yellow grocery store defines the space where they sit, cook, eat, and sleep.
IKEA may have changed the way we buy furniture, but its cheap particle board furniture isn’t always the best choice. Most of the furniture at IKEA is made of fake wood, which you can find in everything from cribs to workstations to 8-drawer chests.
IKEA probably buys the most wood of any company in the world.
Pacific Standard says that the Swedish company uses about 1% of the world’s wood supply to make the furniture it sells at its 300 locations around the world.
In fact, the industry needs so much wood that a subsidiary called Swedwood makes only furniture out of wood. The company has a plan for all of this wood to last, so critics and their eco-friendly friends should think twice before tying themselves to a grove of Scandinavian trees, no matter how angry they are.
The World Integrated Trade Solution says that IKEA buys the most wood of any company in the world. At least 1% of all the wood made in the world each year is used in this industry (21 million cubic meters in 2019 or 740 million cubic feet). The company has adopted a “forest-positive” policy, which means that they will still use real wood, but some of their products will also be made from wood substitutes.
STOCKHOLM, June 23 (Reuters) – In response to a report about illegal logging in the Carpathian highlands, where endangered lynx and brown bears live, IKEA said on Tuesday that it will look into its wood supply chain in Ukraine.
Many IKEA products are made with MDF, which is scary. Most people call engineered wood “MDF,” which stands for “medium-density fiberboard.” You could also call it particleboard, plywood, or chipboard. MDF is the main source of formaldehyde in furniture that is dangerous.
There is a lot of Ikea furniture in apartments and dorm rooms all over the world, but it’s not clear how much of the world’s resources are used to make Ikea products. Ikea only uses one percent, that’s right, one percent of the commercial wood market around the world. This was equal to 17.8 million cubic yards of lumber the year before. Even though it’s hard not to have mixed feelings about the Swedish store, it’s not all bad that cheap furniture is made from wood from around the world.
In July 2018, Earthsight released the results of a study it had done before about illegal logging in Ukraine. We showed that illegal logging was a big problem in the country’s forests, which are all owned by the government. 40% of the €1 billion worth of lumber that the EU got every year was not good. The problem was caused by the State Agency for Forest Resources in Ukraine (SAFR). The SAFR is in charge of both protecting Ukraine’s forests and taking wood from them, which is a difficult conflict of interest. We found out that there was a lot of corruption there as well.
Ikea has not been able to stop using illegal, non-renewable wood in its products. The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), the world’s largest wood-related green label, is to fault for this blunder. Ikea now relies on FSC audits a lot to make sure the quality of the wood it sells. By August 2020, it plans to get all of its new wood from FSC-certified suppliers.