IKEA furniture is so cheap that we'd have to actually charge more to dispose of it than its new price, for that to work. I'm not opposed to that in principle.

IKEA furniture is so cheap that we'd have to actually charge more to dispose of it than its new price, for that to work. I'm not opposed to that in principle. The real problem is, the people most likely to dispose of IKEA furniture are young millenial apartment dwellers who move every 2-4 years. Apartment buildings don't usually have a way to measure each resident's trash, so they usually just split the entire building's trash bill evenly among all the residents (the lease contracts actually specify that it will be done this way). In that scenario, if there are 100 people in the building, everyone including you just pays an incremental £0.50 instead of £50 for your trashed furniture. The result is lots of people trashing furniture. The people living in houses don't move often, don't change furniture often, and usually tend to invest in higher quality furniture than IKEA.