IKEA's Trash Collection: How Showing Products in Garbage Doubled Buyback Rates
The sustainability campaign that worked because it made the brand look implicated, not heroic.
Most brands would never show their products in a trash pile. IKEA did exactly that, and it doubled their buyback participation.
The campaign
In 2021, IKEA Norway partnered with Oslo-based agency TRY to launch The Trash Collection. The team spent two days driving around Oslo and surrounding neighborhoods with cameras, pulling recognizable IKEA furniture out of scrap heaps, street corners, and waste stations. They found 16 pieces in just a couple of days: chairs, shelves, tables, lamps. Each one still repairable with minimal effort.1
Every piece was photographed twice. First in the place it was found, exactly as it was: cracked, scuffed, sitting in the garbage. Then again after refurbishment, cleaned up and looking close to new. Each image was labeled with where the item had been discovered, what repairs it needed, and its secondhand resale price compared to the original retail cost.
The results ran as a hero film, out-of-home posters, and a dedicated section on IKEA’s website that linked directly to its buyback and spare-parts services. Following the campaign launch, IKEA Norway’s monthly average of buyback products doubled. In the first nine months, they collected 5,400 secondhand products through the program.2
Making guilt concrete
The obvious lesson is about honesty in sustainability marketing. But I think there’s a more specific one about what happens when you show your customers a problem they didn’t know they had.
Norway throws away over three million pieces of furniture every year.3 IKEA, as the world’s largest furniture retailer, is responsible for a significant share of that waste. They knew this. Their customers probably knew it on some level too. But knowing something abstractly and seeing your KALLAX shelf sitting in a ditch are very different experiences.
The Trash Collection worked because it made a vague guilt concrete. It gave people a specific image they could react to and a specific action they could take in response. The campaign didn’t introduce any new services. IKEA’s buyback program had been running since November 2020 and the spare-parts program had existed for years. What the campaign did was make people aware these services existed, through images striking enough that they couldn’t ignore them.4
IKEA marketing manager Frode Skage Ullebust acknowledged the discomfort directly: “I must admit that it hurts a little to see our furniture presented in this way, but at the same time, I think it has become a very honest and beautiful way to get people to reflect.”5
That willingness to accept short-term brand discomfort for long-term brand trust is the core of what made this work. Most sustainability campaigns try to make the brand look good. IKEA let the brand look implicated.
From stunt to strategy
The Trash Collection fits into a larger strategic shift at IKEA. This wasn’t a one-off stunt. The buyback program has scaled globally since its 2019 announcement. By 2023, over 211,600 customers had used the service across markets, double the participation from the year before. IKEA sold over 263,000 Second-Chance items through online reservation alone in 2023, up from 70,000 the prior year. Around 430,000 items total were given a second life that year.6
By the end of 2024, the buyback service had processed over 495,000 used products globally and expanded to 33 U.S. stores. IKEA has since launched IKEA Preowned, a peer-to-peer marketplace currently being tested in Oslo and Madrid, and invested over $1 billion through Ingka Investments into recycling infrastructure companies.7
The numbers suggest the circular model is working financially too. Ingka Group’s sustainability report showed IKEA reduced its climate footprint by 24.3% while increasing revenue by 30.9%.8 The buyback program creates a purchase cycle: a customer who returns an old shelf and gets store credit is highly likely to spend more than that credit on something new. The return becomes the start of the next transaction, not the end.
This also positions IKEA in the growing furniture resale market, which was projected to reach $16.55 billion by end of 2025 for living room furniture alone.9 Rather than watch that market develop around them on platforms like Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist, IKEA is building the infrastructure to capture it directly.
Why the creative worked
Three things made the Trash Collection campaign specifically effective, beyond the broader strategic context.
First, it was real. There were no staged photos or stock imagery. TRY’s team went out with cameras and filmed actual discarded IKEA products in actual locations. Caroline Riis, senior creative at TRY, said: “We knew that if we were doing this, we’d have to do it properly. We’d have to do it real and honest.”10 The production constraint, having just two weeks and a couple of days to source the items, actually helped. There was no time to overthink or polish. The roughness was the point.
Second, the before-and-after format did something clever with brand perception. Showing the product in a trash pile demonstrated that furniture waste is a problem. Showing the same product refurbished demonstrated that IKEA products are durable enough to warrant repairing. The campaign simultaneously acknowledged the waste problem and made an argument for the quality of the product. One image did two jobs.
Third, every element connected to an action. The posters linked to the website. The website linked to the buyback service and spare-parts ordering. The film told viewers what they could do right now. There was no gap between the emotional reaction the campaign provoked and the practical step it asked people to take. The distance from “that’s terrible” to “here’s what I can do about it” was one click.
The campaign was recognized globally by IKEA as best practice, and TRY followed it in 2022 with a successor campaign called The Life Collection, which explored the human reasons people let go of furniture, from divorces to estate clearances.11 Both campaigns performed strongly across brand awareness, sustainability metrics, and activation. The approach of radical honesty paired with functional infrastructure became a template.
Infrastructure first, campaign second
The most common mistake in sustainability marketing is talking about values without connecting them to behavior. IKEA avoided this by building the infrastructure first and the campaign second. The buyback program and spare-parts service already existed. The Trash Collection simply gave people a reason to use them.
Tobias Lien, Marketing Communications Manager at IKEA Norway, summarized it well: “One thing we have learnt is that Norwegians really want to recycle, buy secondhand and contribute to reaching our common 2030 goals. They just need to know where to start.”12
That might be the simplest and most useful insight in the whole case. People generally want to do the right thing. They just need to know where to start. Build the infrastructure, then show them the problem honestly enough that they feel compelled to use it.
IKEA Global reported that the TRY team found 16 pieces of abandoned IKEA furniture matching their criteria in just a couple of days, confirming the scale of the furniture waste problem the campaign was highlighting.
IKEA Global’s coverage of the campaign confirmed that the monthly average of buyback products doubled following launch, and that 5,400 secondhand products were collected in the first nine months. MALM was the most popular product returned.
The three million figure is from TRY’s research for the campaign, cited by Fast Company, Contagious, and IKEA Global.
Circle Economy Foundation confirmed that all seven IKEA stores in Norway offered the buyback service by the time of the campaign, and that the spare-parts program had recently expanded to online ordering.
Frode Skage Ullebust quote from Case Studied’s coverage of the campaign.
Ingka Group’s sustainability report data: 211,600 customers used the buyback service in 2023 (double 2022), 263,000 Second-Chance items sold via online reservation (up from 70,000), approximately 430,000 items given a second life total.
Ingka Group’s annual report confirmed 495,000 used products processed through buyback by end of 2024, IKEA Preowned peer-to-peer marketplace testing in Oslo and Madrid, and Ingka Investments committing over $1 billion to recycling infrastructure.
Ingka Group sustainability report: IKEA reduced climate footprint by 24.3% while growing revenue by 30.9%, as reported by Sustainability Beat.
Furniture resale market projection from Contagious’s analysis of the campaign’s strategic context.
Caroline Riis quote from Contagious’s analysis of the campaign’s strategic context.
TRY’s case study page confirms The Life Collection 2022 as a follow-up campaign, and that both campaigns were recognized as global best practice within IKEA.
Tobias Lien quote from IKEA Global’s coverage of the Trash Collection campaign.