Sustainability smacks you the instant you pull into the IKEA parking lot in College Park. Most spaces are tucked under elevated solar panels, a national initiative started in Maryland three years ago to help the Swedish furniture giant generate all its own electricity.

Walk past the U.S., Maryland and Swedish flags and into the mammoth blue-and-yellow building, and the first of many brightly colored, chipper displays makes clear that saving the planet is at stake with every purchase — “5 ways to step into a more sustainable day — every day.”

It’s even on the cafeteria menu, where you can substitute browned orbs of pea flour for those tasty balls of minced pork and beef. Both are aswim in a gravy named for the Swedish right to enjoy the outdoors.

I couldn’t go to Sweden this week with an Annapolis delegation intent on bringing lessons in sustainability and halting climate change home to Maryland.

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Instead, I went to IKEA.

The company has made sustainability a central part of its identity — just as much as those furniture pieces named for towns, Allen-wrench assembled designs, and, yeah, Swedish meatballs. From parking lots to showrooms, from global supply chain to its concept of circular rather than linear consumption, IKEA may be doing more on climate change than any other entity on the planet.

Energy-efficient LED bulbs and rechargeable batteries are on display at the IKEA warehouse store in College Park on Oct. 3, 2023. Shifting to more climate-friendly products was an early step in its plans to reach net-zero emissions by 2030.
IKEA has shifted to energy-efficient LED bulbs and rechargeable batteries as an early step in its plan to reduce climate emissions 50% by 2030. (Rick Hutzell)

Maybe the driving spirit for this started in Sweden. The Scandinavian country has cut emissions by more than a third since 1990 and is on a path to reach net zero by 2045. Seventy-five percent of Swedes believe climate change is the primary challenge of the 21st century — a zeitgeist that gave the world Greta Thunberg, the teenage climate activist.

Now 21, she’s called IKEA a source of “national pride.”

That’s why two Annapolis nonprofits, the MHE and Denker foundations, paid for Annapolis Mayor Gavin Buckley, Anne Arundel Executive Steuart Pittman, Maryland Commerce Secretary Kevin Anderson and 14 others to visit to Sweden through Saturday. They’re studying everything from transportation to tourism, manufacturing to urban planning, environmental research to funding.

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Climate change is a pressing threat for Annapolis, where flooding regularly causes damage and disruption.

NOAA recorded a record number of floods at City Dock this year, with the 97 events documented through Sept. 30 equating to a 33% increase over the record set five years ago, Naval Academy instructor Alexander Davies said Thursday. The city is spending $100 million to make its downtown less vulnerable.

But it’s a worry for everyone. Hurricane Helene killed more than 200 people in the Southeast after coming ashore last week in Florida and then devastating communities from Georgia to Virginia.

Matt Fleming, director of the Resilience Authority of Annapolis and Anne Arundel County, coordinated the trip. We discussed going, but I was committed to moderating a panel discussion at The Baltimore Banner’s iMPACT Maryland on Tuesday.

My topic? “Getting to Net Zero: The difficult path to sustainability.”

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Baltimore Gas and Electric Co. CEO Carim Khouzami, Maryland Chief Sustainability Officer Meghan Conklin, Johns Hopkins Sustainability Director Julian Goresko, and Ava Richardson, Baltimore City’s sustainability director, spent 40 minutes with me discussing how Maryland can meet its toughest-in-the-nation goals — reducing greenhouse gas emissions to 60% of 2006 levels by 2031, and to zero by 2045.

There was talk about collaboration among regional governments, electricity providers, consumers and more. We explored initiatives by Gov. Wes Moore’s administration to provide a down payment on incentives that will push homeowners from natural gas and heating oil to electrical heating and cooling.

Panel members acknowledged it won’t be a straight or easy path.

Maryland is a net energy importer, and shutting down coal-fired plants in the state has only worsened that. Shifting to wind and solar is great, but consumers will pay more during the transition. Natural gas could play a far greater role longer than many realized.

Encouraging construction of energy-consuming data centers, an economic priority for the governor, will only increase the strain on electricity sources and the transmission grid. Khouzami estimated that 200 new substations will be needed to transition to renewables — a real test of public support.

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And the consensus is that the all-of-the-above approach to alternative energy sources means nuclear will grow in the future, probably with a third reactor at Calvert Cliffs in Southern Maryland.

IKEA's location in College Park on Oct. 3, 2024. It is one of two warehouse stores in Maryland, but it has several pick-up locations and a regional distribution warehouse in Perryville.
IKEA’s College Park location is one of two warehouse stores in Maryland, but it has several pickup locations and a regional distribution warehouse in Perryville. (Rick Hutzell)

All this was on my mind as I walked around the 340,000-square-foot IKEA in College Park on Wednesday afternoon.

If you’ve shopped at IKEA, you know its products are like a geography lesson. You can place the source of that wine glass in France, the fiber doormat in India, those clay garden pots in Portugal, and the wireless phone chargers in Taiwan. Oh, and China, China, China.

In April, IKEA joined dozens of companies to reduce greenhouse gases produced by shipping millions of those four items — called Vardagens, Stavrebys, Brunbärs, and Livbojs — from the factories to 473 stores in 63 countries.

The Zero Emission Maritime Buyers Alliance hired the German container ship firm Hapag-Lloyd to move some of its goods over the next two years on biomethane-powered ships — a natural gas alternative produced from landfills, wastewater treatment facilities, organic waste and animal manure.

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The firms say this will cut the equivalent of 82,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide from the supply chain, a major contributor to man-made climate change — a 90% reduction over today’s totals. Hapag-Lloyd’s routes include the Port of Baltimore, where it transfers its goods by rail for a short trip to the IKEA distribution center in Perryville.

Some of what IKEA says and does is remarkable. Some may not be.

It is probably the world’s largest single consumer of wood. While its circular consumption model focuses on recycling that wood through manufacturing and designs that empower buyers to repair and reuse, its suppliers have been accused of making climate change worse by clearing old-growth forests in Romania, Russia, Ukraine and Brazil.

If a similar Annapolis-led mission to the Netherlands is any sign, there won’t be any immediate impact from the weeklong voyage to Sweden. So far, the single most concrete outcome of that 2023 trip might be legislation to bar new drive-thru restaurants in Annapolis.

IKEA probably could have offered a lesson on that as well.

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As I drove the 31 miles from my house to the store in College Park, I wondered if my trip negated some of the carbon offsets made by a company that is very deliberate with its image — so much so that Sweden is still the vibe 50 years after the headquarters moved to the Netherlands.

Then I remembered. There’s an IKEA pickup location in Annapolis.

The idea of sustainability at IKEA extends to the menu in its popular cafeterias, where plant balls — made from pea flour— are offered as a possible alternative to Swedish meatballs.
The idea of sustainability at IKEA extends to the menu in its popular cafeterias, where plant balls — made from pea flour— are offered as an alternative to Swedish meatballs. Both are aswim in Allemansrätten, a gravy named for the country’s right to enjoy the outdoors. (Rick Hutzell)