When it comes to flat pack furniture, Ikea is a market leader by a fairly long margin. However all those bits of furniture require careful packaging to ensure that they arrive at the customer’s house in pristine condition.
Previously, this required a lot of polystyrene packaging which isn’t great for the environment. However, Ikea is now looking to employ a new biodegradable, eco-friendly packaging solution in the form of mycelium.
Organic Packaging Material
Mycelium is essentially mushroom roots, a well-known organic building material that can be modified to create a packaging material that offers great levels of protection for your products. Not only is this fully biodegradable – often breaking down within a month, but it is easily renewable as the mycelium grows quickly into a dense material ideal for packaging.
How does this cost compare to that of polystyrene? It’s undoubtedly a more expensive solution, but the positive environmental impact that this move will have is worth its weight in gold. It is likely that with the increased uptake of this type of packaging solution, Ikea will be able to negotiate cheaper rates in order to create similar, if not cheaper costs for this material.
Why Switch to Biodegradable?
For many companies, recyclable material is more than enough. But Ikea noticed that many of their customers simply do not recycle the polystyrene, either due to lack of facilities or difficulty in doing so. This caused the Swedish home store to decide upon taking new measures to ensure that their company isn’t having a negative impact on the environment.
This is something that hasn’t changed their base product, doesn’t have a huge knock on effect on their day to day running and most customers probably won’t notice, but will put a huge dent in polystyrene consumption. Biodegradable packaging is a very easy way for most companies to be more eco-friendly without having to make huge changes to their business model.
Ikea isn’t the first company to do this, computer manufacture Dell has been using mycelium for several years now to package their servers. Unless you pay very close attention to your packaging materials, most customers never noticed this change.
By making the switch to biodegradable packaging, you can provide a much more environmentally friendly solution that your customers will not have to go out of their way to dispose of. This is something that most companies can do and even small changes can have a significant impact on the immediate environment.
How to Make the Switch?
This is the easy part. Making the switch to biodegradable packaging is as simple as getting in touch with Charlotte Packaging. We can offer you products that perfectly match your needs, help to tweak designs so that the overall appearance remains consistent and delivers the exact same benefits of your previous packaging, with the added bonus of being biodegradable.
Take a look at some of the biodegradable solutions that we currently have available for a better understanding of what we have on offer. If you’re not entirely sure on what the best solution for you is, then give our friendly and knowledgeable team a call on 01495 741 589 today for advice tailored to your needs.