Ecology, together with the concern for the planet, is gaining increasingly greater ground in society and the design world is adapting its products to this change in awareness. With a view to representing this ever-growing concern for the use of recycled materials among people and companies, the new edition of the book of SELECTED, the creativity and design event held in the city of Bilbao, will be made with Guarro Casas’ new Greenluxe post-consumer waste collection of recycled paper. In collaboration with Otzarreta,, the agency which designs the book every year, the challenge of creating the most sustainable book possible using the tools currently offered by the industry has been taken up.
Referring to the new creation, Otzarreta asserted that “Diversity reinforces the designer’s reason why and now pursues a common goal: a sustainable world. For this reason, we wanted to use the visual image as a way of evoking diversity and the concept of sustainability through the material, thus conveying their fundamental role in the search for a sustainable future”.
Recycling is the way to go!
Therefore, the combination of design and paper will represent the possibility of making the most sustainable bindings possible, featuring unique and attractive visual results. This idea emerged in the brainstorming process for the new book, with a 360-degree life-cycle in mind. To this end, all the items involved in making the book are brought into play: post-consumer waste paper, a rustic cover instead of a hard cover, requiring no glue, stitched instead of glued and a cotton thread that degrades very quickly… Everything counts!
In this setting, the cover is created by means of a die-cut that shows the endpaper, which will be executed in different versions to produce different-coloured books, all of which make up our new Greenluxe collection. This die-cut will represent the event’s logo in a macro-scale puzzle that encourages the audience to interact. In this combination, the outside cover will be made with 340-g 50%-recycled Greenluxe in white, the endpapers in 50%-recycled Greenluxe in different colours and the inside in 140-g 100%-Greenluxe.
Fine, but what is Greenluxe?
As we already mentioned, Greenluxe is Guarro Casas’ new post-consumer waste collection, meaning that it has been created with materials obtained through recovery and transformation after they have been used by the consumer. This paper, due to be launched in the third quarter of 2020, is manufactured in two different ranges: one with 100%-recycled pulp, from sources carefully screened to guarantee the paper’s strength; and another range with 50%-recycled pulp, in which the rest is comprised of long virgin fibres for jobs with highly-demanding mechanical requirements. This diversity makes this paper the perfect medium for rigid packaging and publishing products with grammages above 120 grams, as well as for flexible substrates above 300 grams. Thus, a total of 18 references are offered, distributed in 11 different colours in the 50%-recycled version and 7 colours in the 100% version, plus 4 different grammages.
Indeed, this collection mirrors the change in environmental awareness: production got under way in 2018 and was only available for special production on request by customers. The decision to market it on a regular basis in the catalogue stems from a greater awareness in society of the need to give objects a second lease of life, meaning that there is a greater demand for materials recycled by industry. Moreover, Guarro Casas has always been respectful of the planet, which is one of the values that underpin its innovation and production processes.
Strong for publishing
Being a material applied to the publishing sector, in this specific case through the SELECTED book, the material must guarantee that it can be opened and closed repeatedly as if it were virgin fibre paper. The Greenluxe collection has passed the Quality Department’s most stringent tests and presents a peerless appearance, while also offering the same personalisation options as our other materials: printing, stamping, coating, embossing, gluing, scoring and folding.