Colorful and fun, used by children during the bath. Ikea boats are very popular with children but now they are also popular with adults. The Swedish giant has in fact developed the same boat but of much larger dimensions to clean up waste from the waters
Colorful and fun, used by children during the bath. Ikea boats are very popular with children, but now they are also popular with adults. The Swedish giant has in fact developed the same boat but of much larger dimensions to clean up waste from the waters.
Ikea's latest effort to improve its environmental footprint thus mimics the popular SMÅKRYP game. The company has designed a very simple but functional remote-controlled boat, the Good Ship Ikea, which removes waste from the water through two arms placed on one end.
The boat is able to remove up to 20kg of debris at a time. And she has already done so in Great Britain where she has been in action until the last few days. Earlier this month, two so-designed boats were deployed in Deptford Creek in south-east London to remove garbage from that stretch of the River Thames and celebrate the opening of IKEA's new Greenwich branch.
With a weight of 70 kg and a length of 3 meters, the Good Ships Ikea could prove to be a fun and innovative solution to eliminate waste present in rivers, at least in part.
Until February 19th, Ikea offered Londoners and tourists of all ages the opportunity to drive boats as part of an educational initiative. Once the experiment was over, the store chain donated the two boats to Hubbub, a charity program that aims to inform citizens about pollution in London's waterways.
The presence of the boats was certainly an Ikea commercial initiative, launched in conjunction with the opening of what the company called the most sustainable store in the UK, in Greenwich. This is clearly an advertising move by Ikea but which has served to highlight once again the problem of pollution of the seas and rivers linked to plastic.
The garbage collected during the experiment with the two IKEA Good Ships will be transformed into a sculpture for the shop.
Although the two boats will not be able to eliminate the 300 tons of waste that are fished from the Thames each year, they have been useful in showing Londoners how polluted their iconic river is.
READ also:
- Stop to plastic in the sea: the device that blocks 80% of the waste arriving from rivers arrives
- Manta, the boat that will remove plastic from the seas
- GUNRID, the new Ikea curtain that purifies the air of the house by simulating photosynthesis
Francesca Mancuso
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