Environmental Control & Social Responsibility. "HSE Green" Meets IKEA

© Photo is taken from the official group Vkontakte "HSE green in St. Petersburg"

Recently, the issue of the ecological state of the world has been raised at different levels, starting with bloggers drawing attention to the problem and not excluding production companies themselves. IKEA - an example of such production.

Student organization “HSE green in St. Petersburg” invited the coordinator of socio-environmental issues in IKEA Parnas and IKEA Dybenko – Mba Eiyama Rosa, who spoke about the structure of production in the company, processing and use of wastes as well as about social support of people.

“What is a sustainable development strategy?” Mba Eiyama Rosa asked students, starting her lecture. - “This is the development of each of us (individual) and society, when using resources, we think about what will happen to future generations.”

She also noticed that this strategy had been existing in IKEA for many years, but its serious development and relevance acquired since 2015. To understand the whole system of the company, the speaker indicated that IKEA in Russia have 14 stores in different cities, a distribution center, two customer support centers, a design studio and a lot of other offices. Moreover, it is interesting that such a large industry as IKEA has a clear strategy, which it will adhere to:

• Sustainable development (striving to achieve day-to-day missions),
• People (improvement of life of as many people as possible - social aspects, economic, health of buyers),
• Growing IKEA,
• Low prices.

And that is right, because to manage a global company and attract the attention of buyers for years is really difficult.

But what about problems?

The company consumes a lot of energy and water, has a huge impact on climate change in its composition of raw materials, its production.

To answer this urgent question, a representative of the company immediately opened the slide with the slogan: "Yes! - people and planet".

Photo is taken from imorganic.ru

Unfortunately, not many people think about the possibility of recycling and the creation of new things.

However, IKEA in Russia pays great attention to the difficult situation with wastes, realizing that it has a huge audience that listens to the company and trusts as a brand, so it tries to share its knowledge about this problem.

An important question that many listeners wanted to know the answer is how IKEA sorts garbage in stores?

Mba Eiyama Rosa immediately noted that it is physical work almost every employee of the company is engaged in, going to work earlier and collecting cardboard, stretch tape, any metal parts, and then taking it to the zone where the sorting process takes place.

“Such work is interesting, everyone is involved in the sorting process and the quality of sorting, the level of wastes sent for processing depends on everyone. Everyone contributes.”

Thus, let us together become those "everyone" who will make our planet cleaner and the air fresher with small steps.

Text by
Viktoria Grebennik