Coloured trees

Jan Ahlsén, materials specialist and innovator, worked for IKEA for over 40 years. He was known for his curious mind and his eagerness to experiment. Originally a structural wood engineer, he took a special interest in wood – one of the most important materials for IKEA through the ages.

“While I was studying to be a wood engineer, I was particularly interested in the cell structure of trees,” says Jan, now retired. “I was curious if it could be changed in some way. For instance, why not try to dye the wood while the tree was still growing?” he says. “But achieving that was never going to be easy.”

Jan was often out travelling, looking for sustainable new materials for IKEA along with its local purchasing organisations around the world. These would then acquire the selected materials, and find local producers to process them and make products, of wood for example.

Once a year, all the buyers from different regions would come together for a range presentation at IKEA in Älmhult, where they could see what materials were needed for future products. “Around 1990, we focused heavily on light woods like birch,” says Jan. “The buyers from Asia saw all that light wooden furniture and shook their heads. They might as well go home as those woods simply weren’t available in Asia. But then they came back with different ideas, like using rubber trees which are lighter in colour. They also suggested we make outdoor furniture from eco-certified teak, which grew all over Asia.”

Fast-growing replacement

Jan Ahlsén liked the idea of dark-brown outdoor furniture, but there was a major obstacle. Even in the 1990s, IKEA was holding intensive discussions about the environmental risks involved with forestry. Hardwoods like teak were protected, and environmental certification was still in its infancy. IKEA competed with other producers for a very small market, and could not get hold of enough certified teak from approved plantations. Instead, IKEA wanted to find wood species that were similar to teak but not under threat.

Jan Ahlsén was tasked with finding new tree types that grew quickly and had the right properties for outdoor furniture. He began by meeting with forest and paper companies in Sweden, and discovered that many of them had their own tree plantations in Asia. Fast-growing trees like eucalyptus and acacia were grown, and then ground down into chips to make paper.

“If we could start working with a paper mill, for example, IKEA wouldn’t have to enter the jungle. After a lot of tests, we settled for acacia,” says Jan. But he soon encountered problems.

It turned out that while the paper mills did plant a lot of trees, they cut them down after just seven years. At that age, the tree trunk had a darker centre core than the rest of the tree. “Streaky wood can be a problem when making furniture,” Jan explains. Otherwise, everyone agreed that acacia had the right properties for outdoor furniture.

Engineers in Älmhult started experimenting with different kinds of stain to make acacia wood a consistent colour. But Jan Ahlsén had a far wilder idea: he would finally get to dye trees while they were still growing.

Tree geeks unite

One perfectly normal day in Stockholm, Jan was strolling around a large wood trade fair. At one stand he met Hans Merving, a Swedish mechanical engineer and inventor who was passionate about forest management. He and tree geek Jan Ahlsén immediately had a lot to talk about.

Hans explained his new invention, a small piece of plastic that was drilled into tree stumps and root systems to prevent excessive undergrowth. This plastic plug had an ampoule inside, with a small amount of pesticide. This was released into the transport tissues of the tree without leaking into the surroundings.

Straight away, the idea came to mind to fill Hans Merving’s plastic plug with dye instead of pesticide. Both men were optimists, and believed the transport tissues inside the tree would convey the dye right into the tree’s heartwood.

“This is an excellent idea, you must keep working on it.”

The experiment begins

Jan invited Hans Merving to IKEA in Älmhult to discuss the idea with ten or so people. During the meeting, the door gently opened. A person in jeans and a check shirt stepped inside and took a seat at the back. He didn’t say a word the entire meeting. It was Ingvar Kamprad.

Afterwards, everyone went off to the IKEA Hotell to eat a traditional Swedish Thursday lunch of pea soup and pancakes. As Hans went up to the buffet to get some pancakes, he felt someone touch his arm. It was Ingvar. He said, “This is an excellent idea, you must keep working on it.”

A thousand or so plastic plugs were filled with dye: powder mixed with liquid to make sure it could be transported inside the tree. Jan Ahlsén started making preparations to test the idea in an acacia forest somewhere in Asia. The collapse of another major IKEA project presented an opportunity.

“A large dam was going to be built in Laos, Southeast Asia, and a lot of Lao pine forest was going to be felled. IKEA had made a deal with a Swedish guy in the area, called Peter Fogde. He would start a sawmill and take care of the trees being felled to make room for the dam and IKEA would buy the pinewood. But suddenly the dam project ground to a halt. Someone had found a unique plant, or it might have been a protected insect, and the whole project was cancelled.”

Meanwhile though, Peter Fogde had started a small acacia plantation, where Jan Ahlsén could test his dyed trees idea.

Competing experiments

Engineers at IKEA carried on with their staining tests on acacia wood, while Jan Ahlsén booked a flight to Laos and packed his plastic plugs, drill and hammer.

After a month of testing, pieces of wood were sent home to Sweden for checking. It turned out that the wood had been dyed upwards and downwards, but not right into the centre. Today, Hans Merving thinks more time or a deeper plug had been needed. Jan Ahlsén was of the opinion that more dye was required. “I was going to attach a hose to the plug to add more dye, but by then it was already too late,” he says.

The IKEA workshop experiments with staining had gone far better than expected. With the right treatment, the engineers had given the acacia wood an even surface, so Jan Ahlsén’s plans to dye growing trees were suddenly of far less interest. As he so often did, Ingvar Kamprad made a quick decision. IKEA would stain the wood and stop the dye-plug trials.

“We would always eat brown beans and pork and talk about our crazy ideas.”

Meeting in the model workshop

Every spring, Ingvar Kamprad and Jan Ahlsén would meet in the model workshop in Älmhult with a handful of other ideas people. “We would always eat brown beans and pork and talk about our crazy ideas, both successes and failures,” Jan explains.

This particular spring, Jan obviously talked about his trials with dyeing acacia trees in the forests of Asia. Ingvar said that the idea had ‘failed miserably’, but Jan objected. “I said we’d given up too soon. Still today I believe it would work in technical terms!”