Let’s face it, IKEA can be pretty frustrating. The queues, the ‘herding’ around the store, the hunt to find what you’re after in the vast warehouse with just a nine-digit number and the unwieldy trolley. But, after protestations that you’ll never return, somehow, something comes up and you just have to go. And then we find ourselves a little annoyed – at the store for offering a handy, inexpensive option and at ourselves for leaving with more than we went in for. There is no denying it, though: IKEA has become a staple in the lives of we Brits.

Since the 1980s when IKEA began its dramatic expansion, 19 stores have sprung up around the UK. And despite the criticisms of environmentalists about encouraging consumerism, IKEA’s environmental policies are many. Indeed, saving resources is something that IKEA’s Sustainable Development Manager Charlie Browne says is at the heart of the company, something of great importance to founder Ingar Kamprad from the farm Elmtaryd in the village of Agunnaryd (IKEA... geddit?). As early as the 1970s, Kamprad wrote: ‘Waste of resources is a mortal sin at IKEA.’ What’s more, saving resources makes financial sense.

For instance, IKEA’s big blue bag was an instant hit with the customer (how many have you got in the attic?) and made great savings for the company, too. In the same vein, Browne explains: “Taking two centimetres off the width of a sofa allowed us to get something like six more onto a trailer. And now we’re flat packaging sofas. It’s a fairly basic sofa, but it reduces those bits of air that you have to transport.”As well as taking care of its ‘in-house’ environmental policies, so to speak, IKEA is providing customers with disposal routes for furniture that’s being replaced. Understanding the need for a take-back system is the easy bit; developing one that adheres to the waste hierarchy is trickier. “Other people are offering take-back schemes, but they are right down at the bottom of the waste hierarchy. It’s taken away and it’s shredded for recycling. We did look at a central recycling facility, but being spread over the UK the logistics of reverse flow is quite difficult, so we wondered what else we could do. We thought we could deal with a local waste contractor – put a container in our rear yard and collect, charge the customer, and the supplier would take them away and recycle them. Or, we go up the waste hierarchy into reuse.”

IKEA had already been working with the Furniture Re-use Network (FRN), dealing with damaged products and so on, and so it was an obvious route to explore, as Browne explains: “[FRN]’d been saying to us: ‘A high proportion of stuff, if you can get it while it is still warm from the house, is of a good quality.’ What’s more, FRN’s Code of Conduct and auditing system gave us a bit of security, because there are a lot of fly-by-night operators.”

So, in 2009, IKEA began offering an information point explaining at the point of sale a little bit about FRN. A year later, an FRN link was put on the IKEA website. By clicking on the engagement spot (or e-spot) ‘Can we take your old furniture?’, customers were taken to the FRN site and directed to local reuse charities.

The fact that there was such an incredible response to the e-spot (around 10,000 hits a month) pushed IKEA to develop its own take-back service, passing used items on to local charities affliated with FRN.

To avoid lorries turning up at charities at all hours, IKEA agreed to consolidate collected material before passing it on. Two stores were chosen as pilots: Coventry and Wednesbury. Customers choosing the delivery option on sofas, mattresses or kitchen appliances could, at an additional cost, get their old item picked up at the same time, so long as it was in a reasonable condition. “It is very clear in the terms and conditions that the driver has the option to say no, and we will not take industrial fridge-freezers that have been in your garage for six months, we will not take a sofa that has been in your garden”, notes Browne.

Unfortunately, the response in the pilot stores was disappointing. But, as with most pilots, lessons were quickly learned. “We priced it wrong; we communicated it wrong; we didn’t do the market research we could have done”, suggests Browne. “There’s a different demographic in Wednesbury and Coventry in regards to people having more of a reuse culture in some areas. We priced it at £25 to start with because we didn’t know what to price it at so we just looked at what John Lewis, Argos and the like charge.”

Even though only a few a week took up the offer, IKEA still felt it was worth pursuing. So, the communication was changed from ‘£25 takes your old furniture’ to ‘We want your old furniture’ with the price in small print below; the cost also came down, to £15 (on top of the £15 delivery charge).

The new service in Wembley has, as a consequence, seen a much better response. “Wembley launched in October and they were up to 150 collections in five weeks. Their aim is by the New Year to be doing around 10 a day.” Browne says: “For the customer, the key to the service is convenience, from IKEA’s perspective, that customers shop with us rather than a competitor.”

In terms of flow, it’s mattresses first, then sofas and then white goods. About £6 of the charge stays with IKEA and goes towards the cost of the sealed plastic bags customers are asked to put items into and container charges. The charities then charge IKEA a gate fee for the items they collect from the stores. “Although they are hopefully going to make money on the product through reuse, there will be a proportion that they are going to have to repair or clean or recycle. So each store makes a local service agreement with their local charity and the charity will invoice us for the goods that they take. It’s generally between £6 and £9 per item.”

Likewise, FRN does not go unrewarded. “We rely on FRN. They are the experts so we want them to reassure us that we are working with the right organisation. And part of the gate fee per product that the charity will charge us will be a donation to FRN. It’s something like 50p-£1 per product.”

If, as Browne hopes, Wembley collects around 3,500 reusable items a year and other stores reach around 1,000 collections, IKEA should take back 20,000 items in the first year. “That’s 20,000 customers that we’ve solved a problem for”, says Browne. (And also a good haul for reuse groups.)

He adds: “The biggest part of our carbon footprint is the products we sell, so if we’re really serious about carbon reduction, the embedded carbon in these products that we’ve either diverted from landfill into reuse or recycling has obviously got to be good. And we’re supporting local communities.”

Roll out to all stores is happening at time of writing and should have been in place by Christmas. “I think this is a must for retailers... Local authorities are saying, ‘We’re going to start charging you for it’, landfill costs are escalating and raw materials are becoming scarce.” Browne adds, without an answer as yet: “We’re already talking about the next phase of this – of the recycled materials that are coming from the charities – how can we get that back into production?”

But it doesn’t stop there. Just arrived in Wednesbury and Brent are reverse vending machines for light bulbs. For every bulb they recycle in store, customers can have 10p donated to a charity of their choice or get a free cup of tea or coffee in the restaurant. “If we collect all this stuff, we will offset some of our costs in terms of the WEEE Regulations and paying compliance costs... just by doing that we’ve saved £30k a year.”

The next big thing on Browne’s agenda is restaurant food waste. “The last 10 per cent is always difficult and we are finding there are problems with onsite composting; we’ve looked at macerating systems but there doesn’t seem to be much hard and fast research on this.”

As Browne says: “It’s all about bleeding edge technology – new technology that hurts a bit at the start!”