Ultra Board Sustainable Book Stands
With many people confined to home last year due to the pandemic, millions rediscovered a love of reading. Total consumer book sales in the UK alone rose 7%, while specifically fiction sales jumped an astounding 16%.
This is great news for the publishing industry as people again become wrapped up in pages and – with lockdowns easing and shops reopening – it highlights the need for more physical display stands. The question is, will this surge in production create a negative knock-on effect for our environments?
The paper manufacturing industry is the third largest user of fossil fuels in the world. This isn’t necessarily a problem, but it very quickly becomes a problem when you think that paper products account for 25% of all landfill waste in the US, and over a third of landfill waste in Canada. These numbers are a lot better in the UK (with up to 70% of packaging waste being recycled or recovered) but there’s still a lot of room for improvement.
And while book publishing doesn’t account for the whole amount of national waste, every little helps. Of course, books themselves are rarely ‘waste’ – they tend to circulate through bookshelves, second hand shops, families, and friends. But there’s a lot that goes with new book sales that does end up as waste.
Namely, all of the marketing materials.
The banners, leaflets, window posters, and display stands that all go into selling a book are the parts which, unfortunately, often do end up in landfill.
But we’ve set out to stop this. It’s time to get sustainable.
How Ultra Board can be used for sustainable book stands
Our paper honeycomb graphics display product, Ultra Board, can be printed, cut, shaped, and assembled in as many ways as you can imagine. It’s made from recycled paper and is itself 100% recyclable – thus closing the loop from raw material to product and diverting a huge amount of material from landfill.
Ultra Board isn’t reserved just for display stands for books, it can be used to create standout (and stand up) displays for any product. Here’s a stand for the world-famous soy sauce brand, Kikkoman, featuring an eye-catching representation of their iconic bottle design.
From here, it’s only a short step to displaying books in vibrant, engaging, and low-waste ways.
Ultra Board’s honeycomb core gives it inherent strength that’s impossible to achieve with other paper alternatives without either increasing the amount of paper used dramatically (thus increasing weight, size, and delivery costs) or reinforcing with other, rigid materials like wood or plastic (thus increasing assembly time and reducing recyclability).
Ultra Board is customisable
Ultra Board doesn’t have to be a single pattern that’s folded in assembly (though that’s certainly possible) – it can be multiple patterns cut out to create delightful 3D designs.
It’s a medium that really frees designers to be able to create what they have in mind – not what’s limited by fabrication.
On top of this, it’s surprisingly durable. If you need neutral display stands that simply form a structural part of a display that holds up a book (or multiple books) – that’s possible too! You can go from guns-blazing full tone prints to neutral earth tones as easy as pie. Regardless of what your end requirements are, you can be sure that you’ll be able to get there through Ultra Board.
Let’s talk
If you’ve got a custom requirement for your next book launch, let’s talk about how we can make that dream display a reality – sustainably.
