The arrival of high-speed flatbed industrial printing has given printers the ability to print stunning high-resolution images directly onto large rigid sheets.

Increasingly, sustainability-focussed designers and corporations are asking what happens to these print-substrates after their useful life. Do they actually get recycled or do they end up as toxic landfill?

"X-Board," Xanita's flagship product, is unique in that it offers the properties of rigid boards such as MDF and particleboard, except it's much lighter and 100% repulpable back into paper.

Here are a few examples of how X-Board has been printed for in-store visual display applications.

X-Board was used to create lifestyle appeal within Shoe City stores where the boards were mounted onto a cost effective rail system which enabled staff to easily access storage space behind each printed board.

X-Board was installed as aisle indicator boards within SPAR stores where SPAR wanted to combine clear bold product identification with appealing images. X-Board was printed on both sides to be visible across the store.

Signage of this type is usually printed on corrugated polypropylene sheeting which is a cheap plastic-based product that is seldom recycled as it's cheaper to dump as landfill waste.

Woolworths South Africa chose to use X-Board for these hanging signs.

X-Board was used to create lifestyle appeal within Shoe City stores where the boards were mounted onto a cost effective rail system which enabled merchandising staff to easily access storage space behind each printed board.

Below are some examples of POP Displays best suited to X-Board:

Water Bottle & Bottled Food Displays

A typical sheet of 16mm gauge X-Board Print weighs around 2.4kg per sqm. MDF on the other hand, in the same board thickness, weighs around 11.2kg per sqm, making X-Board nearly five times lighter.

X-Board is VOC-FREE, MDF contains up to 80kg of formaldehyde resin per cubic metre. MDF cannot be discarded as normal landfill. X-Board can be repulped into paper to be re-used as cardboard boxes or similar.

What does this allow?

Well, if a desginer of say a bottled water or tinned paint display needed to create hundreds of displays for distribution across a wide region, he or she would historically have chosen to use either MDF or steel for their design.

The MDF would be two-pack painted or vinyl wrapped and would more than likely need specialist tools to assemble on sight. Designing the same display out of 16mm X-Board, assuming two 1220 x 2440mm boards are needed per display, saves the desginer a massive 5,200kg in total road freight savings. 100 MDF displays would weight up to 6.6 tons versus X-Board at only 1.4 tons.

At the end of their useful life, the MDF displays need to be disposed, and can't be disposed of as ordinary landfill. 
The retailer also can't simply dispose of them out the back of the store in the industrial general waste bin, as in many countries, it's illegal to do so. Merchandisers therefore have to go in and take the displays away, break them down into smaller panels and dispose of at proper waste centres. This adds further enormous costs to the campaign.

It's now easier to see how XB becomes best for footwear, white goods, electrical goods, tinned products, books and magazines and more. This is why X-Board is being fast embraced by forward-thinking POP display designers.  

X-Board Plus

For longer-term POP displays, X-Board "Plus" panels can be decorated with any FSC certified timber veneer, melamine-faced MDF, foil or high-pressure laminate.

X-Board was installed as aisle indicator boards within SPAR stores where SPAR wanted to combine clear bold product identification with appealing images. These X-Board sheets were printed on both sides and are clearly visible across the store. Because the boards are so light, they were easily hung from store’s suspended ceiling grid.

Woolworths South Africa chose to use X-Board for these hanging signs. Unlike rigid foam PVC or high-impact polystyrene which is normally used for these applications, these signs will be sent to paper recycling bins after use.

X-Board was used for this conceptual surfboard display with embedded LCD screen. Even the shelves were made from 10mm X-Board.

 X-Board was used for these decorative tables for Proctor and Gamble.

sales@xanita.com