IKEA and sustainability: children’s furniture made from jungle wood?

As the largest consumer of wood in the world, IKEA promises sustainability and strict controls on its suppliers. Research by the ARD magazine Contrasts and the environmental protection organization Earthsight show, however, that there are great doubts about this commitment.

IKEA has been making a comprehensive promise since 2020: All wood is either FSC-certified or recycled, according to the furniture store’s image films. Certification by FSC, the largest wood certifier in the world, means that the wood has been sustainably produced, legally felled and fairly traded.

Environmentalists: “Huge deforestation scandal”

According to research by, at least one Indonesian manufacturer of IKEA products held the FSC certificate Contrasts and the environmental organization Earthsight doesn’t do what it says on the tin. Sam Lawson, director of Earthsight, said they had “discovered a huge deforestation scandal.” This had “expired under the radar and unnoticed by the largest eco-labeling agency in the world, the FSC”.

The IKEA supplier in Indonesia is PT Karya Sutarindo, one of the largest manufacturers of children’s furniture for IKEA. In 2020 alone, more than two million products were delivered to IKEA from there. These include the “Latt set” with a table and two chairs, as well as most of the items in the Sundvik children’s range, including chairs, tables, beds and wardrobes. All products are made of pine wood. Since there are no pine trees on the island of Java, the wood has to be imported.

IKEA’s globalized supply chain

Contrasts there are shipping documents that show that a good quarter of the pines processed by PT Karya Sutarindo come from Siberia. One of their biggest suppliers is after Contrasts– Research the company Uspekh. She sits in Bratsk, in the middle of Siberia, surrounded by impenetrable forests. Uspekh has no forests of its own, and the company sells wood that it buys from local suppliers, including Vilis, the largest supplier of raw materials. Vilis belongs to Yevgeny Bakurov, a 44-year-old entrepreneur whose companies have large areas of forest available thanks to numerous state licenses.

Legal or illegal?

Documents that Contrasts available show that Bakurov has repeatedly cut more wood through the Vilis company and other companies than he was officially allowed to. For example, a maximum of 5200 cubic meters of wood per year was allowed in a licensed area, but it struck 37,000 cubic meters. This was made possible by additional licenses that he had illegally obtained from the responsible authorities.

Several companies owned by the wood baron regularly produced a multiple of the permitted amount, as documents from the Russian forestry authority show. Satellite images also show that specially protected forest areas have been harvested several times. So-called sanitary wood or rescue cuts are also allowed in protected areas, but Bakurov’s companies repeatedly misused these “rescue cuts” as a pretext. At least that is what the Russian authorities discovered and repeatedly objected to in court between 2012 and 2018.

Bakurov’s company had some of its licenses revoked, but only after the damage was done. Overall, Earthsight calculates, the companies are said to have illegally felled 2.16 million cubic meters of wood in the past ten years. On Contrasts-Bakurov did not respond to the request about the allegations.

Systematic problem of FSC

The practices of Bakurov’s companies should have caught the eye not only of the state inspectors, but also of the FSC certifying body, says Pierre Ibisch, professor for “Nature Conservation” at the University for Sustainable Development in Eberswalde. Because every single company in IKEA’s supply chain, from Bakurov’s company to the exporter Uspekh and the Indonesian wood processor PT Karya Sutarindo, was in possession of an FSC certificate.

Court rulings in which Bakurov’s licenses were withdrawn are publicly available and should have set off the alarm bells at FSC. But the companies kept their seal.

Forest scientist Ibisch sees a “systemic problem of FSC”. The organization relies on local auditors, who in turn are “easy to influence”. Overall, Ibisch comes to a tough verdict: “The FSC seal serves more as a calming pill for the consumer than as an effective control system,” he says.

FSC wants to investigate the matter

Faced with the research, the FSC writes that the matter will be investigated and the certification body checked on site. An improved FSC forest management standard has been in force for Russia since March 2021, which subjects “all FSC-certified forests to stricter controls”. In addition, one is considering targeted transitional measures in Russia, which aim to “immediately prevent non-compliant products from entering FSC-certified supply chains.”

IKEA praises improvement

On ContrastsWhen asked in June 2021, IKEA now grants an earlier collaboration with Bakurov’s companies and writes that nowhere in the world can there be room for the abuse of sanitary logging. That is why the decision was made in March 2021 not to accept any more wood from a number of companies associated with Bakurov as a precautionary safety measure. The group did not provide details of which companies.

In a response to Earthsight, IKEA insisted that the wood had been legally felled. Contrasts opposite it now only says that the wood was legally acquired.

The Indonesian company PT Karya Sutarindo did not respond to the request. Only after Earthsight and Contrasts Having confronted IKEA with their research, the group published a press release on its corporate website at the end of June, which states, among other things, that many interest groups have been observing the abuse of sanitary logging in certain areas of Russia for several years.

In fact, IKEA confesses: “Based on the findings from the implementation of our control system, we are not confident that the current use of sanitary logging guarantees responsible forest management. Therefore, IKEA has decided to temporarily discontinue the use of sanitary wood from the Far East of Russia and Siberia with immediate effect to disallow”.