CURVES IN ALL THE RIGHT PLACES

Introducing a new street furniture product to the Australian market, Urbania is taking sustainability to new heights.

With its commitment to sustainability in outdoor furniture at the forefront of its endeavours, Urbania is proud to have recently become the exclusive Australian distribution partner for urban and outdoor structures company Durbanis.

A Spanish-based company, Durbanis is driven by a passion for developing functional and aesthetically pleasing public spaces. It is committed to doing so via a path that observes our global ecosystem, designing and manufacturing coherent products that work with the landscape, with an eye toward a circular economy.

Durbanis has dedicated its resources to reformulating its plastics in order to produce its designs using materials that can be reintroduced into the production cycle. It recovers plastics from packaging waste and treats it to use as its raw materials in manufacturing. The company also generates designs that are linked to the environment in which they were conceived and can be reintroduced into public spaces in clean and sustainable ways.

With an aligned ethos of sustainable production and innovative design, Urbania has partnered with Durbanis in Australia to release the Caribou collection. An indoor/outdoor furniture range, Caribou has been specially designed to offer open areas a multitude of public space options. Consisting of three types of benches; Straight, Curve and Star, the modular nature of the Caribou range offers endless arrangements and application possibilities.

Made of recycled polyethylene plastic, Caribou’s uniqueness lies in its organic and universal design, along with its sustainability benefits. Offering a wide variety of installation options, each element can be filled with water or sand, or anchored to the ground with screws, to ensure an appropriate fixing point in line with its intended use. Metal brackets secure the modular elements together to guarantee correct positioning for a firm, stable and durable installation.

Generate creative and functional public spaces with Caribou’s extensive range. Choose a Curve unit, which can be combined with a linear Straight unit or joined to another Curve unit to form an inclusive seating arrangement. Run a series of Straight units together and span a wide area to provide a front row seat for dozens at an outdoor performance. You can even add dimension with a Star piece, a radial unit that behaves like a fractal, joining Straights and Curves to form unique units that face a multitude of directions all at once.

THE CORE OF SUSTAINABILITY

Made from recycled low-density polyethylene, the Durbanis range is unique in that it can be recovered to remanufacture new designs. While other plastic formulas mix plastic with biological materials, making them inseparable, Durbanis aims to create circular designs to furnish public spaces with units that have an endless lifecycle.

All Durbanis furniture is mass dyed, UV protected and resistant to UV radiation, and able to withstand temperatures from -40 to 80 degrees celsius. Recycled from industrial waste, the composition ranges from 50 to 100 percent.

Due to its nature as a monomaterial, the plastics used by Durbanis do not break the production cycle. All materials can be separated by type at the end of their life and either responsibly disposed of or recycled back into the production process, becoming fresh products once again. No toxic gases are released during combustion, making them safe to be around, further ensuring the success of the cyclical process that forms the company’s basic tenets.

In addition to their sustainability benefits, the plastics used to create the company’s collections are non-porous, resistant to detergents and bacteriostatic – meaning they stop the growth of bacteria. Pressure washing is all that is required to clean them or remove graffiti, and colours can be rejuvenated using a plastics regeneration agent. These characteristics make Durbanis’ products highly suitable for public spaces, offering ease of cleaning, hygiene benefits and longevity in outdoor conditions.

With benefits like these, Urbania was pleased to be able to join with international company Durbanis to become the exclusive Australian distributor and help build a better quality of public space for the nation.