LIGHTBLOCKS® Sustainability

LIGHTBLOCKS® are luminous and inspiring custom colored resins with a renewable matte finish for architecture and design. We fabricate our LightBlocks panels to your specifications in any thickness, any color, any opacity, any size and any resin.

	Moving into the future with efficient, beautiful, sustainable materials is vital to our mission here at MB Wellington Studio. We focus relentlessly on creating the most beautiful materials that are right for your project and right for our planet's future. All thermoplastic materials are recyclable. Finding smooth and practical pathways for this process is critical to keeping them in the circle of creative utility. We make certain that resins we supply keep that circle unbroken.
	The Right Resin for the job will be the most efficient for your purpose and your budget. Creating an end design that will last as long as your vision dictates is our goal. We aim to leave the smallest environmental footprint and efficiently recycle the raw materials back into other useful products when your application has run its course. After studying your design, we make the correct polymer (resin) recommendation for your project, then fabricate it for you and ship it ready to install with no job site waste.
	Our Patented Process uses no solvents so there are no VOC's created in the making of any type of LightBlocks. Our plants are inspected for employee safety and our indoor air quality is consistently cleaner than even the fresh air of New Hampshire, where our home plant is located.
	Recycle-Ability is so important to our studio that we would never embed anything in our resin. Resins with embedment CANNOT be recycled efficiently (unless the entire sheet or scrap is incorporated into a new design, or unless the embedment is the same polymer.) ALL our scrap is recycled. We have an average 98% utilization of raw materials, coloring or patterning ONLY the parts you need so you pay for few leftovers. Here are the ways we recycle our materials:
	The Bin Small cutoffs, trimmings and shavings are divided by polymer type, binned up and sent to a recycling plant to be ground up and re-shaped into useful forms such as fiber or molded parts. We have recycled over 250,000 pounds of these resins, which would otherwise languish, unchanged in landfills.
	Inventory Larger leftovers are inventoried and stored for the next application. It takes time and energy to do this, but spares you the extra cost of high yield fees and makes good use of a high value added resource.
	Re-Purposing Polymers Worldwide As a resource for our plastic distributors, we routinely accept the cut-offs and leftovers from other manufacturers for re-purposing in our plant.
	Democracy of Design Completed parts that are left over after production (perhaps the project description changed mid-production or we produced the wrong shade by mistake) go to our Design Shelf and are available to inspire our architect and designer clients as well our in house Democracy of Design Team. Our very creative employees on the team create designs for useful products that utilize the beauty and recapture the effort and energy that went into the original material.
	ReRun Studio Returned Parts are becoming a bigger and bigger part of our Design Shelf. As the useful life of a project comes to an end we accept back the raw materials to be given a new life in our ReRun Studio. Utilizing our "found" raw materials, ReRun design editions are featured the Museum of Modern Art retail stores in New York City.
	Plant -Wide Recycling In the last year we calculate that 32% of our raw material was recycled back into the life cycle of useful polymers using the methods described above.
	Recycled Content The recycled content of a product is different from the plant-wide recycling averages. We know that when the correct polymer for the job is specified, it will last as long as intended by the designer and can then be recycled. Sometimes the best polymer for the job is virgin material, made from source materials such as natural gas, petroleum or even plant sources such as corn. Your project deserves the very best raw materials. If a higher actual recycled content is vital to the project, we can provide it. Most providers use the plant wide recycled content number when describing their "recycled content" - implying that each part they provide actually contains that percentage of recycled material. We are pleased to explain the facts, believing that you will make good use of the truth.
LightBlocks Specifiers Can Get LEED Points for: Recycled Content LEED 4.1 Construction Waste Credit LEED 2.1 Regional Materials LEED 5.1 Materials Reuse LEED 3.1 Select Projects may also qualify for: Innovation in Design LEED 1.1-1.4 (designing with materials, designs that can be 100% recyclable and/or reused)