This 2019 ad by Ikea, the company tries to portray a set of daily tasks we must do in order to reduce our carbon footprint, as the intro quote says: ‘’Cut your carbon footprint in half with simple everyday actions’’.
The whole ad tries to guide us into fulfilling this goal by implicitly bombarding the viewer with imagery that shows their products.
The general aesthetic of the ad portrays Western cosmopolitan life in a very green way. An idealization of mundane tasks like grocery shopping, cooking, making laundry, traveling through the city, etc. All of these tasks are shown in a very unrealistic way to the average viewer, as most things portrayed in the video can only be done by people with a good economical situation. Some explicit examples of this are: ‘’power your home with the sun’’, if we take into consideration the price of installation of solar panels this sounds like a joke; ‘’enjoy fresh local produce’’, as if they were economically available for most families or even for local markets to sell, as they cannot compete against the big supermarket’s prices; ‘’for zero food miles, grow your own’’, regular worker class people don’t have enough free time for those bourgeois hobbies, unless they can earn a living of it; ‘’eat some greens, why not try some veggie-balls?’’, we go back again to how pricey it is to consume good products; ‘’power up your car with clean power’’, this is just straight up ridiculous if we consider the price of electric cars; ‘’power down your heating or air con, all you need is great insulation’’, this can sound even insulting to families with precarious flats for which they pay most of their salary.
To illustrate the approximate sum of money it would take to have most of these ‘’ecological alternatives’’ I have made this little table.
ADVERTISED ITEM | APPROXIMATE PRICE |
Domestic solar panels | One of the most common domestic sizes is a 4kW solar panel system, which costs around £6,400 and will cover around 29 square meters of your roof. (not apt for flats) |
Electric car | As of July 2022, the average price of a brand new electric car in the UK is £47,456. |
Insulation installation | Insulation typically costs between £1,400 and £10,000, depending on the size of your home, as well as the property type. Insulating an older building with solid walls is going to cost a lot more than insulating a modern home with cavity walls, for example. (In Spain most houses are made of solid brick walls) |
TOTAL(aprox) | £58.000, almost twice the amount that the average UK employee earns a year. |
*With this we are not even accounting for the daily good quality basic needs they want to promote.
The problem with these ads is the attribution of ecological responsibility and consciousness to the average consumer, when in reality, the biggest polluters are corporate companies, like Ikea. The way the ad shows their products in an implicit way in order for us to buy them, is just an economical stunt that grabs the values of ecologist and anti-consumerist ideology and ‘’greenwashes’’ them into a mere aesthetic that could be resold to consumers in perfectly elaborated catharsis.
The process works in this line: Corporate company (Ikea) puts the fault on the consumer for contributing to pollution and climate change, consumer feels guilty of an issue they are not as much responsible as the company, the company gives the consumer a way to relieve themselves from their ‘’environmental sins’’ by buying their ‘’eco-friendly’’ products, consumer buys the product and unintentionally contributes to pollution due to the means of production of big enterprises.
The process becomes especially ironic coming from Ikea, as they are the biggest wood consumers in the world, and their demand is duplicating by the decade. They even went into a big controversy when they were caught by Earthsight using illegally gathered beech wood from the Ukrainian Carpathians and the Russian Siberia, places where several animal species are endangered.
The issue with big companies trying to promote ‘’green values’’ is that it is dialectically impossible, as there is no way of maintaining a business, especially of such proportions, by promoting a set of values that go against the capitalistic system they are built on. With this said, I would even dare to go farther and state that not a single corporate company under the capitalist system is able to promote green values in an honest and not ‘’greenwashed’’ way.
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