Circular Business Models @IKEA Austria

On Wednesday, the 11th of June, Rainer Pamminger was listening to a talk from Matej Hargas, Country Sustainability Manager for IKEA Austria, organised by the ARA Innovation Space. This ended in a nice conversation where also a collaboration within our KATCH_e project have been discussed.

IKEA spends a lot of effort in generating new initiatives for their circular economy model to ensure an extended product life, since a lot of IKEA products that can be found in landfills which are still in a good condition. The firm started to rethink the design of their products to make them easier to recycle – e.g. they use their own plastic waste to create new plastic goods. A brand new initiative is “IKEA Second Life” where customers have the possibility to resell their used IKEA products instead of throwing them away. All one need to do is to send IKEA a few pictures of the product and they will send back an offer in the next few days. With this project IKEA likes to establishes a second hand market to extend the life cycle of their products. In the future IKEA Austria plan to force their activities in the circular economy business towards repair and maintenance services or renting instead of selling.

Further information about the event:

https://www.innovation.ara.at/news/circular-business-models-case-study-ikea/