PETpla.net Insider 04 / 2017

MATERIALS / RECYCLING PET planet Insider Vol. 18 No. 04/17 www.petpla.net 17 The Swedish furniture retailer Ikea is relying increasingly on recycled PET bottles. 25 bottles make a door At the start of this year, Ikea introduced Kungsbacka - a range of kitchen cabinets made from recycled PET bottles and reclaimed wood. The furniture company has worked together with its Italian Purchasing Operation Team to develop a plastic film for this purpose - made entirely from recycled PET bottles. 25 PET bottles (0.5l) are needed in order to make enough plastic film for one 40x80cm Kungsbacka kitchen cabinet door. The project’s PET bottles are collected in Japan, the same location where the plastic film is produced. This film then begins its journey across the sea to Italy, where it’s glued onto kitchen doors. 25 half-litre PET bottles are needed in order to make plastic film for the front of one 40x80cm Kungsbacka black kitchen cabinet, meaning almost 1,000 bottles would be required to manufacture an entire kitchen (in the standard measurements) with 20 doors and the corresponding amount of panels. “What we do here at Ikea has major consequences for the environ- ment, as we work on a large scale with large quantities. If we use recycled material, it means production becomes more sustainable,” explains Anna Gra- nath, Ikea product designer and project manager of the team who worked to develop the Kungsbacka range. A project with a vision: two years previ- ously, in March 2015, the wheels of the plan to design kitchen cabinets that were both sustainable and afford- able were set in motion. Together with an Italian Ikea supplier, the product development team began to explore the possibilities that recycled materials had to offer, leading to a new material being developed – a plastic film made from PET bottles that had been thrown away. These bottles are collected and processed into a film in Japan. This film then begins its journey across the sea to Italy, where it is laminated onto kitchen doors. “Of course we’d like all the stages of production to be in one place, but unfortunately we’re not there just yet,” outlines Anna Granath. Even the wood used as a base material in the Kungsbacka range is 100% reclaimed and FSC-certified, obtained from old furniture or packag- ing material, for example. This means that both main materials used to manu- facture Kungsbacka kitchen cabinets (wood and plastic) are 100% recycled, and it is only the adhesive material used in the chipboard, and colour pig- ment used in the plastic film, that are in fact new. “Our biggest challenge in making a film from recycled material is trying to achieve the same quality standards as attained by film made from new mate- rial. We have now accomplished this without having to compromise on qual- ity or price,” explains Marco Bergamo, manager of the development team at the Italian Ikea supplier 3B. Ikea has forecast that using recy- cled films instead of those containing oil results in 20l less oil being used to manufacture a kitchen. If every kitchen cabinet door made by Ikea was coated with a plastic film like that used in the Kungsbacka range, 9.6 million litres of oil could be saved in 2017 alone. “We want to use recycled materials for all plastic films applied to our doors in the future. In doing so, we’ll use other recycled plastics and not just PET bot- tles,” outlines product designer Anna Granath. www.ikea.com