Emma Cooper

On Tuesday Pete and I were invited to Ikea Milton Keynes to see their recycling and rainwater harvesting systems, and to talk about composting. We were taken on the ‘eco tour’ they give to school groups, which wanders round the operational areas that customers don’t normally get to see.

First up was the area where they collect fluorescent tubes from the store, and compact fluorescent (energy saving) lightbulbs from customers and send them for recycling. Energy saving bulbs contain a small amount of mercury, and should be treated as WEEE waste for recycling, not thrown in the bin. The company that recycles the bulbs has discovered that some of the bulbs Ikea collects still work – possibly because customers are clearing out old bulbs they no longer need, or returned a multipack with one malfunctioning bulb – and they are going to fish those out and donate them to social housing.

Next stop on the tour are the water tanks. There’s a huge one for the sprinkler system, and two smaller ones – one for mains drinking water and one that collects rainwater that’s used for flushing the toilets. It is large enough to last for 12 days without rain, and using rainwater in this manner saves energy at the water treatment plant and on pumping the water.

Moving on to the boiler room – in the winter the store is heated with a biomass boiler that runs on wood chips. There are two large hoppers that store the delivered wood chips until they’re needed. This boiler wasn’t in use on Tuesday.

The store is also equipped with a smaller biomass boiler that runs on waste wood. The store produces quite a lot of wood waste (old pallets and broken furniture, I guess), which is chipped and fed into a hopper and used to heat the store’s hot water. This boiler runs all the time, I think, and has an operating efficiency of around 99%, which means only a small amount of ash is produced and sent off to landfill as inert waste.

(The new store that has opened in Dublin has a ground source heat system under the carpark, plus the small waste wood biomass boiler, and future stores are likely to have them too – but these systems are hard to retrofit to older stores.)

The waste wood chipper is upstairs, out at the side of the store where all the recycling and waste disposal takes place.

There’s a recycling bin for almost everything. Plastic wrap and cardboard are both baled up and sold for recycling (although due to the lack of recycling facilities in the UK, a lot of this material will be sent overseas).

Even waste electrical cables are collected for recycling – the copper inside is very valuable and can be reclaimed.

Ikea’s recycling efforts in the UK are such that stores average around 85% recycling rates. Their target (handed down from Ikea International) is 90% – which means that they really want to deal with the food waste from the Ikea restaurant. A couple of stores are trialling composting systems, but not all of them have the space. And there is the problem of what to do with the finished compost, which is still classed as food waste by DEFRA.

The reason behind my meeting was to discuss ideas for giving away waste coffee grounds from Ikea stores to keen composters among their customers – like the Starbucks ‘Grounds for Your Garden‘ scheme, only on a much larger scale. Ikea MK, for example, can easily serve 2000 cups of coffee every day.

The sheer volume of coffee grounds is only one problem to overcome. There are the food waste regulations, and the operational problems – Ikea staff would need to be able to make the coffee grounds available to customers in a clean and efficient way that doesn’t take up their time and impact on their productivity. Packing the grounds back into the original coffee packets would be too slow, although getting customers to pack their own is a possibility.

Ikea’s environmental efforts (at least in store) appear to be genuine and demonstrate what can be done without affecting the bottom line – Ikea are also dedicated to cutting prices and keeping costs down, and they don’t invest in systems that end up costing them money. They are happy to show off their recycling systems, and would be equally happy to hear ideas on how they could recycle more. So if you’ve got any thoughts about their coffee grounds/ food waste issues, or other ways that the stores themselves could hit their impressive recycling target, then do let me know and I will pass them on.