Description:

It’s a material life
The PET used to make Vicinity™ Desk Screens is an acoustic panel today, but we also care about what it was yesterday and what it might be tomorrow. Our planet has a growing problem with waste, and with 45-50% of total waste going to landfills in New Zealand coming from construction and demolition, there is an incredible opportunity for positive change. Vicinity Desk Screens explore this opportunity and were reimagined through the exploration of recycling in-house waste into new materials that have completely circular lifecycles.

What comes in many shapes and sizes but is always circular…
Truly acoustic, Vicinity Desk Screens control distracting chatter and background noise at the source. Vicinity is a modular desk screen system made from 60% post-consumer PET and designed to be fixed, non-destructively, to any desk via the Vicinity Desk Clamps. Through the reimagining of this product system, the simple, intuitive design makes installation and customisation easier than ever before. And, it recycles waste, reduces cost, and fully considers end-of-life. Options range from style, width, height, colour, and corner details, all to create a tailored experience for every user.

Vicinity Desk Screens (clamps included) are made from a single material (PET), dematerialising traditional multi-material desk screens that use MDF, foam, fabric, and staples. This innovative design simplifies recycling, as it eliminates the need to disassemble and sort different materials into separate waste streams.

An industry-first solution
The true innovation is the new Vicinity Desk Clamp, made from 100% recycled PET through a unique and industry-first pelletising process called RePET. This process transforms in-house waste into rigid polymers in the form of pellets, which are injection-moulded to make more clips and product components. This circular lifecycle simplifies recycling, creates product opportunities across industries, reduces reliance on fossil inputs, and diverts material from landfills.

Designed for disassembly at end-of-life, Vicinity can be recycled through the RePET process with the clamps. RePET is more cost-effective than the previous desk clamp, it increases the production speed, and reduces the weight of the material used by 95%. Through the RePET process, we have been able to repurpose over 140,000 kg of waste into new components. This is just the beginning, we will increase our operational capacity, expecting to reach an annual amount of over 240 tonnes of repurposed material with plans to make the tech available to other industries and support other recycling initiatives.

A subtle evolution
The form of the design is intended as an evolution of the previous iteration, taking aesthetic cues from the previous and updating them to match current trends while leveraging the capabilities of the RePET process. The form also allows for strengthening/structural elements to be hidden away from view, intending to make the components seem impossibly light and delicate while still performing their main function of clamping a screen to a desk. Every element of this product has been thoughtfully designed to add colour, texture, performance, and circularity to spaces where people come to work, learn, and live.