Australian environmental flooring company, Style Plantation is planning to expand its production base to other parts of the world with a unique transportable strand woven factory.
Style Plantation’s transportable strand woven factory is an innovative technological development and can be installed to existing wood finishing factories anywhere in the world to manufacture strand woven products using locally available soft wood species as input material.
Using locally available materials would enable the manufacture of an entirely new range of strand woven wood products, based on domestic soft wood species such as Poplar, Australian Blue Gum, Oak and Hickory.
Until now, Style Plantation’s strand woven products have only been manufactured in China because the existing labour-intensive manufacturing process could not be replicated outside China due to raw material sourcing and manufacturing cost issues.
The ‘mobile’ manufacturing factory is a result of a 12-month research program undertaken by Style in partnership with Flinders University’s Molecular Technologies Research Centre in Adelaide, South Australia and partly funded by the Australian Federal Government.
According to Style’s Chief Executive Officer, Mr Peter Torreele, the research has resulted in the development of a unique model for an exportable and economically viable manufacturing cell to produce strand woven products outside of China, by designing a highly automated international block factory with a similar cost base to China.
Mr Torreele explains that the new transportable strand woven factory model has been designed as an ‘add-on module’ to existing wood flooring finishing factories anywhere in the world. The company is currently in discussion with wood flooring manufacturers to form strategic partnerships for licensing of this patented technology, thereby creating a new revenue stream for Style Plantation.
This latest technological breakthrough will allow Style to increase its global market share of the strand woven flooring market.
A world leader in green strand woven technology, the Melbourne-based Style introduced strand woven flooring products in 2004.
Strand woven flooring products are increasingly being adopted in interior design projects, gaining mainstream appeal as the ‘green alternative to exotic hardwoods’. Additionally, increasing consumer demand has created a vast ‘green building’ market for sustainable design and construction products.
