Xanita and The Design Company (TDC), a prominent Cape Town based retail design specialist firm, have recently collaborated on several large projects in the shop fitting sector. By specifying Xanita materials, TDC has embraced eco-friendly design whilst ensuring that these solutions remained commercially competitive.
Xanita’s X-Board and X-Board Plus were specified for several in-store applications, due to their load-bearing capabilities and excellent green credentials. The lightness of the board contributed to massive weight savings, ultimately reducing labour, transportation, suspension and fitting costs.
Suspended bulkheads and header boards were manufactured from X-Board Plus for the Footgear store in Century City. X-Board Plus consists of Xanita’s X-Core, which is a precision engineered, high density, post-consumer recycled kraft paper and bagasse fibre waste, manufactured into a high-strength, VOC-free, closed-cell honeycomb structural core. Outer skins, such as MDF, are then bonded to both sides of the core creating a strong, lightweight composite panel.
All of the items were pre-manufactured to ensure efficient installation on site. Due to the lightweight construction, simple cable suspension methods fitted to the roof purlins were used. This negated the need for additional suspension systems, which are characteristic for traditional heavier materials. Similarly, X-Board Plus and X-Board were used to create suspended and slatted bulkheads for the @home stores in Gateway and Canal Walk shopping centres in South Africa.
X-Board Plus was also used to produce shelving for Markham’s in Durban. 32mm thick shelves were manufactured with decorative non-scratch laminates to produce a lightweight, chunky and eco-friendly solution, which was used to replace traditional heavier materials. Employees who continuously change shelving layouts were extremely pleased with the ease of handling and lightweight benefits of this new system.
Shop fitting projects such as these would have typically used heavier medium density fibre board (MDF/Supawood) where on site cutting, screwing, gluing, sanding and drying time would have delayed the project substantially. By making use of X-Board and X-Board Plus on these projects, there were substantial cost savings to the shop fitter and end user. In terms of the environmental impact, the carbon footprint of these projects throughout their entire lifecycles was reduced and the TDC designers were able to fulfill their brief’s sustainable requirements. |
