Shipping gets bad press — often justified — over its pollution and environmental record.

Yet another example of this is Swedish furniture giant Ikea’s latest advert, being beamed now into millions of UK homes.

In the short promotional clip, a robot spots a poster for a film called Defender Droids with the tagline Save The Planet!

Inspired to take action, the machine starts picking up rubbish like plastic bags in a bid to clean up, in a bit of a steal from the Pixar classic Wall-E, if we’re honest.

The eco-warrior android then has a run in with a truck at what appears to be an oil refinery, but ends up covered in mud.

The robot trudges disconsolately to a beach closed because of an oil slick.

Oily sludge is then hoovered up and analysed by our hero, before the camera pans out to reveal a huge spill coming from a tanker out at sea.

The robot goes home even more unhappy before being cheered up by his metal family, who are doling out healthy looking food and growing plants in wooden boxes.

Perception pressure

An eagle-eyed reader drew TradeWinds’ attention to this blink-and-you’ll-miss-it scene as reinforcing the message from a recent Torvald Klaveness webinar.

During a chat about decarbonisation, Klaveness executive Martin Prokosch, head of ZeroLab, said shipping’s dirty image is a little exaggerated in the public mind.

But the perception is probably helping put pressure on the industry to reform its ways more quickly, he added.

Ikea has recently revealed it is chartering containerships and buying boxes to combat congestion and a shortage of space globally, as it runs dry of certain items in its stores.

The company is a leading proponent of biofuel and teamed up with French line CMA CGM to test the greener bunkers as far back as 2019.

In August, US retail behemoth Walmart revealed it had chartered space on boxships.

And in June, another US giant, Home Depot, took matters into its own hands by chartering its own container vessel.

“We have a ship that’s solely going to be ours and it’s just going to go back and forth … 100% dedicated to Home Depot,” chief operating officer Ted Decker said at the time.