The Ikea store in Queens, New York, which opened on Jan. 14, marked a decided departure for the iconic home furnishings brand. Located in the Rego Park Shopping Center, the 115,000-square-foot open layout a new, smaller format for Ikea is divided into core areas of the home, offering small-space solutions tailored to city living. Rooms are thoughtfully merchandised with easily portable accessories like lamps and throw pillows that customers can take with them on the bus or subway, both of which are a block away a key factor in choosing the stores location, given that more than half of city residents use public transportation.

Digital stations allow shoppers to self-pay and arrange furniture delivery for bigger pieces for a flat fee of $49. The company is working to make all last-mile deliveries in New York City by electric vehicle, according to Jennifer Keesson, country sustainability manager for Ikea U.S. a test run on the way to making the last mile of its more than 2 million annual home deliveries nationwide zero emissions by 2025.

The Swedish powerhouse set out 80 years ago to create a better everyday life for the many people as its motto goes by putting sleek, stylish home furnishings within the budgets of the masses, and became a $35.4 billion (2020 revenues) market force in the process. And just as the brand is widely credited with democratizing design, its now moving to make sustainable living the norm rather than the exception, with a sprawling strategy thats wildly ambitious in scope.

Ikeas overarching goal is to become climate positive by 2030 reducing more greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) than its entire value chain emits. It plans to do this while still growing its business by designing new products, moving into new markets and building dozens, perhaps hundreds, of new stores in that time. The company is charging ahead with plans to open 50 more stores (of various sizes and formats) in 2021 alone.

Expanding its retail footprint on a warming planet may seem to fly directly in the face of Ikeas plan to reduce its colossal climate footprint. In the last year, moves to decrease energy use across the business, from manufacturing to what it serves in its restaurants, have reduced its climate footprint per product sold by 7%, the company estimates. Meeting its 2030 target while selling ever more will mean cutting the average climate footprint per product by 70%.

Given that Ikea emitted the equivalent of 24.9 million tons of carbon dioxide in 2019 accounting for 0.1% of the worlds GHG emissions that year its a Herculean undertaking that encompasses virtually every element of its business, from the materials it sources through product manufacturing and transport. Emissions reductions will also come from efforts to pull carbon out of the atmosphere (without the use of carbon offsets) and influence supplier and customer behavior.

Making products last longer, and giving old products second lives, is a central pillar of its climate ambitions: Ikea aims to become a 100% circular business by 2030. That means creating home goods that not only meet Ikeas definition of democratic design affordable, high-quality, sustainable, stylish and functional but also can be reused, refurbished, recycled or remanufactured into new items.

Materials contribute the most to Ikeas overall climate footprint, followed by the use of products in customer homes. Squeezing carbon savings out of those budgets poses the greatest hurdles toward meeting its ambitious targets, which were set to align with the Paris climate accord goal of keeping global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

An increasing number of companies have said theyll be climate positive by 2040 or 2050, but relatively few have said 2030, said Andrew Winston, a corporate sustainability strategist and author of The Big Pivot . Ikeas challenge is also much more complicated because they manufacture tons of different products unlike a company like Google , which has also set incredibly aggressive goals.

The sprawling infrastructure and commercial leverage that enables the company to manufacture and sell millions of products is exactly what Ikea is banking on to realize its climate goals.

Obviously the consumption model of the 1900s that we were part of will not work in the future, because were consuming more than the planet can provide, said Ingka Group CEO Jesper Brodin on a Harvard Business Review podcast last December. Ingka Group is the largest of 12 strategic partners in Ikeas franchise system, operating 380 Ikea stores around the world.

I love mass production, said Brodin, because if you put it in the right aspect, you can scale up change so much better and faster. If you can scale something thats climate-positive, thats probably the best and fastest way of doing it and bring the cost down so sustainability doesnt become something thats only for those who can afford it.

Seeing The Forest For The Trees

Arguably few companies, particularly in the retail industry, have Ikeas vision and knack for innovation. Founded in 1943 by the late Ingvar Kamprad the name is an acronym of his initials, his family farm (Elmtaryd), and his birthplace (Agunnaryd) it quickly became known for low prices. Chagrined competitors tried to pressure suppliers to boycott the brand, driving Kamprad to start designing products in-house and thinking early about moving beyond his home market.

Ikea shifted to flat-pack, self-assembly products in 1953 to minimize shipping costs and damage to mail-order deliveries. In 1970, the first self-service area was opened at Ikeas flagship store near Stockholm, which allowed customers to walk out with flat-pack furniture in hand to assemble at home. The debut of Ikeas first store outside of Scandinavia, in Switzerland, in 1973 set the stage for international expansion: Ikea is now the worlds largest home furnishings business, with nearly 530 stores (including test formats and planning studios) in more than 50 countries.

The seeds of Ikeas shift to sustainability were planted (literally) in 1998, with the launch of the Sow a Seed Foundation, which sought to rehabilitate large swaths of rainforest lost to logging and forest fires in Malaysian Borneo. Over the next two decades, Ikea funded the replanting of 3 million trees across 31,000 now-protected acres of rainforest.