> The Billy innovations are about working within the limits of production and logistics, finding tiny ways to shave more off the cost, all while producing something that looks inoffensive and does the job.

The perfect summary of Ikea's engineering.

I got into woodworking recently; designed and built a 50", full-back garden bench from scratch in redwood. The project gave me a more keen awareness of the wood that surrounds our lives. I've ruminated on everything from sustainability of wood to the pros/cons of engineered wood products like those used in most Ikea furniture.

When my wife and I bought a headboard for our bed, one of those cheap bookcase/headboard combos bought online for $150 shipped, I couldn't help myself from wondering whether this boxed slab of wood and glue was an engineering marvel, or an abomination. The odor, the comically insufficient assembly instructions, the chipped off veneer and color matching marker. Was it all worth the cost savings?

I once thought that engineered wood products like those used in these cheap flat pack were stronger than natural wood. A lot of that furniture felt lighter to me. In fact, engineered wood products _can_ be stronger, and get used in building architectures that would not be possible with natural wood. But the stuff used in cheap furniture is MDF and that weird, coarser particle board. My limited research showed MDF as being weaker than most natural softwoods, in terms of strength to density. The lightness of the furniture comes from simply designing the products to use less wood.

Ikea furniture, as this article discusses, is optimized. The least amount of substrate is used to achieve the goal. That's not a bad thing; it's a thing to be admired. But you could do the same thing with natural wood, and the end result would be lighter.

The odor, caused by binding resins used in the engineered wood, is also an indicator of off-gassing formaldehyde. I figured, the stuff being used couldn't be that bad or they wouldn't have been able to sell it for so long. The answers I found were unclear. Formaldehyde _is_ bad; it's a carcinogen, and as it off-gasses from these materials the concentration of formaldehyde in the air slowly rises throughout the enclosed space; throughout your house. The more formaldehyde containing products in your home, the higher the concentration. It's a potentially significant health hazard. There are alternative resins that don't contain formaldehyde, but they aren't commonly used.

The most important thing about this cheap furniture, I figured, is that it's good for the environment. The optimized design reduces the use of wood to a minimum, and the engineered wood can make optimal use of trees since it just needs chips or sawdust. I grew up in the 90s where it was common to joke how every piece of paper you wasted was killing a tree. The implication being that wood products are a scarce resource that we need to preserve and use as little of as possible. We all needed to be good caretakers of our planet. Recycle, cut down less trees, and boybands. It was the 90's.

As my ruminations stumbled over this mantra of the green movement it occurred to me that wood ... is a sustainable resource. We can always grow more trees, right? I see so much household wood being replaced by engineered wood and plastics. But plastics are non-renewable! We can't grow more oil. There's ultimately no consequence of "wasting" wood. Just throw more seeds on the ground and let the complex nano-machinery of life assemble a brand new piece. It costs nothing but time and land (which we have plenty of). The discarded piece of wood becomes food for the next.

Certainly wasting wood increases costs. Engineered wood is cheaper because it can use the table scraps of sawmills. But cost wasn't the concern in this trail of thought; it was the environment. From an environmental perspective, we should be using as much wood as we possibly can, and enact laws that require all wood products to be sourced from trees grown for that purpose. We can take advantage of this beautiful renewable resource and ensure an explosion in tree population. Our air will be fresher, more carbon will get locked back up in solid material, and the reduction in plastics consumption will dump less carbon into the air.

At the end of my adventure I decided ... this kind of furniture is not for me. Natural wood products are better for the environment, lighter, look better, last longer, and are less toxic. The only thing against them is cost. Whether cost matters or not is a different question entirely. For me, I'll sit on my redwood bench out in the sun and smile.