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An unfortunate reality for the environment is that IKEA furniture often costs less to trash it and buy new than to hire people to move it.

It would be interesting if we could create a world economy in which moving something always costed less than manufacturing another instance of it.



Moving furniture is probably a difficult one to charge for, but a disposal fee might incentivize moving or selling second-hand/reuse. If it's gonna cost me £30 to move a Billy and £50 to dispose of it, I'm going to move it instead.

But mass manufacturing and the industrial revolution really and our current economic reality has warped things. It's easier for raw materials to be mined from the ground, processed in a factory, molded into a form, packaged, shipped across the ocean, put into a store, purchased by a vendor, and then resold to end consumer as part of a to-go meal in the form of a plastic fork, and then discarded by the consumer (me), than it is for me to bring a fork to the cafe and wash it and bring it home when I'm done.


IKEA furniture is so cheap that we'd have to actually charge more to dispose of it than its new price, for that to work. I'm not opposed to that in principle.

The real problem is, the people most likely to dispose of IKEA furniture are young millenial apartment dwellers who move every 2-4 years. Apartment buildings don't usually have a way to measure each resident's trash, so they usually just split the entire building's trash bill evenly among all the residents (the lease contracts actually specify that it will be done this way). In that scenario, if there are 100 people in the building, everyone including you just pays an incremental £0.50 instead of £50 for your trashed furniture. The result is lots of people trashing furniture.

The people living in houses don't move often, don't change furniture often, and usually tend to invest in higher quality furniture than IKEA.




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