Swedish furniture giant Ikea refuted criticism from Greenpeace on Thursday, which claimed that suppliers for the company were destroying old-growth forests in Romania.

In a report released on Wednesday, Greenpeace said that wood from biodiversity-rich old-growth forests was being used in IKEA furniture, and called on the company to review their supply chain to become a 'champion for better forest protection'.

The environmentalist group said the manufacturers Ikea used in Central and Eastern Europe were linked to some of the last remaining old-growth forests in Europe and said that while the supply of such wood wasn't illegal, it also wasn't sustainable.

"We really wanted to understand where wood from old-growth logging is ending up," Greenpeace Romania's Forest and Diversity Expert, Ciprian Galusca, said as he walked through one of the forests in the Carpathian Mountains.

"So we looked at the wood traceability system that is a public system created by the Ministry of the Environment and we simply used GPS data from the trucks that were loading wood from the forest and sending it to IKEA partners, to the furniture producers."

Galusca said the logging sites linked with IKEA’s suppliers visited by Greenpeace CEE were identified as old-growth not only due to their average age, as listed in the publicly available forestry management plans, but also because of their diverse composition, with the presence of trees of varying sizes and species including habitat trees which gave them the ability to provide for numerous ecosystems and preserve the biodiversity.

Ikea said they do not accept wood from protected old-growth forests in their products, and that the sourcing practices outlined in Greenpeace's report were legal and adhered to both local and EU regulations, in addition to being certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC).

"Old-growth forests have been mapped and protected in Romania since 2012. IKEA does not accept wood sourced from Intact Forest Landscapes or other geographies identified as High Conservation Value Forests (HCVF) unless the area is certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC). Since our wood is FSC certified, all supply chains and forests undergo annual checks by FSC-accredited Certification Bodies and IKEA conducts multiple forestry audits and wood supply chain audits each year by our forestry specialists," they said in a statement to Reuters.

Greenpeace said in their report on Central and Eastern Europe that the FSC certification scheme does not always recognise old-growth forests for their true biodiversity value, which allowed industrial forestry and logging practices under FSC certification, even in forests they said should be strictly protected.

Galusca said they were pushing for the authorities to become "better administrators" of the forests, to ensure that logging operations were sustainable and the forests remain "resilient against the climate change effects."

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(Production: Malgorzata Wojtunik, Claire Watson)