Last week, The Wall Street Journal reported that IKEA had bought up almost one hundred thousand acres of forest in Romania and the Baltic — this, after the company had been accused of “brutal” logging practices in Russia and cutting “old forests that have high conservation value,” according to the WSJ. The company doesn’t log in Russia anymore, and instead will focus on farming its Romanian forests, managing its purchase to create a renewable source for its operations. After all, IKEA uses one per cent of the world’s wood supply, a number it’s trying to scale back by half. It’s all part of the company’s plan to become “forest positive” in the next five years, growing more wood than it uses.
Similarly, Apple recently bought up a 36,000 acres of forest in Maine and North Carolina. These areas are “working forests,” or regions that act as renewable sources of wood and paper pulp for industry. Apple and the Conservation Fund, which is collaborating on the project, says that these “working forests” are increasingly being developed.
