Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish,
a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden.
My name is Dan Schreiber and I am sitting here with James Harkin,
Andrew Hunter Murray and Alex Bell and once again we have gathered round the microphones of our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order here we go.
Starting with you, Alex.
My fact this week is that one percent of the entire planet's wood supply is turned into Ikea furniture.
Bullshit.
That's true.
But they've only got 400 or so shops globally.
Have you ever been to one?
Yeah, but they're pretty big.
Think about how many books there are, right, in the world and how many trees are needed for that.
So if you think of an Amazon warehouse globally, all the warehouses, surely more wood goes there.
I think the amount of volume that passes through those shops is huge.
So one of the reasons that their furniture is so cheap is the way they've packaged it.
So if you open up like an Ikea bookcase package, it's incredibly tightly packed together.
There's very little polystyrene in it and that's like part of the reason it's so cheap apparently.
Also you have to transport it from one place to another but you're not transporting any air,
which is heavy when you put a lot of it in a big lorry.
Can't sport in there.