More activities are hosted in the living room today since it’s more changeable and fluid. The sofa has changed in design and become more flexible – we even lie on it and sometimes we sit against it. That's why we decided to make a new rug with new proportions and a softer feel. We went on a mission and studied weaving techniques in detail, tested qualities and various samples with our bare feet until we created a rug that met all the new needs. The result is VINDUM rug.
In traditional living rooms, often centred around the TV, we've seen the rug placed in front of the sofa together with a coffee table. But this is beginning to change.
Today, the sofa is not only for sitting on. When it's full of family and friends, we're happy to move onto the rug and use the sofa as back support.
This places new demands on the rug.
”It’s on its way to becoming a second sofa”, says designer Maja Ganszyniec. ”So it must be really cosy to sit and lie on while also being aesthetically pleasing”.
Maja and her colleagues started to study different thicknesses and designs.
”I became quite the rug nerd”, says Maja enthusiastically, remembering a visit at a supplier in Belgium. ”My favourite meeting was when we were eight adults walking around in socks and sitting on various rug samples to find the one with the right feel”.
The work eventually led to VINDUM, with a thick, dense pile where features of differing colours create exciting effects.
”It’s kind of like when you gaze at a painting from various angles”, explains Maja.
VINDUM has a more square shape than most other rugs. With the various sizes, you can easily find a perfect combination to suit your sofa. We hope it’ll become a loved feature in many homes. As a kind of ”cosy hub”. A nice and sound-absorbing place to gather all of your friends.
Plastic is most commonly derived from oil and gas, which are non-renewable fossil sources. These sources do not renew themselves and will eventually be depleted.
Our ambition is that by 2030, all plastic used in our products will be based on renewable or recycled materials. Renewable plastic is made from materials such as vegetable oil, corn, wheat grain and sugar cane. Recycled plastic allows us to give a second life to non-biodegradable products such as PET bottles that would otherwise end up in landfill. Using recyclable sources also lessens our dependency on oil as a raw material.
Currently more than 40% of our plastic products are based on recycled and renewable materials and our aim is to reach 100%. As we add products made from recycled and renewable materials to our offer, we hope to inspire other companies to do the same.
Single-use plastic items pollute ecosystems if not disposed of responsibly. As part of our commitment to people and the planet, all single-use plastic products from the global home furnishing range were phased out in 2020. This includes items such as plates, cups and plastic straws offered in our restaurants, bistros, and cafes. These were replaced by disposables made from 100% renewable sources.
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PET is the most recycled plastic in the world and can be used for many different purposes such as plastic bottles and containers for packaging food and beverages as well as for personal care products, pharmaceuticals and many other consumer products. At IKEA we mainly use recycled PET in boxes, filling material for textiles and kitchen front foil.
PET is approved by health-agencies as safe to use for food and beverage. IKEA uses recycled PET that is post-consumer based, which means it is based on collected and sorted PET bottles.
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Our journey towards only using recycled or renewable plastic will take some time and require new ways of doing things, but we are determined to take responsibility and find new solutions. We want to give our customers the possibility to choose products made from more sustainable materials that can be recycled again one day. Together, we can make a big difference!
