Wishbone Inc.: New furniture for the gym and vestibule

WISHBONE INC.:

New furniture for the gym and vestibule

The utterly romantic notion of using one's jack knife to carve 'Jason loves Jennifer' inside a heart on a school bench, along with the art of other destructive graffiti, can now go the way of inkwells and mucilage with the growing use of plastics for public furniture.

Newer companies in Canada, like Wishbone Inc., of Langley, B.C., are expecting that the generation of young people attending our schools today is far more sensitive to the importance of recycling.

“In the past you never concerned yourself about loading up the garbage can” explained John Jansen, president of Wishbone, “in that we threw stuff into the garbage expecting it to kind of disappear, but now, were starting to realize our landfills are filling up - with plastic with very few land fill options available”.

British Columbia schools now encourage students to recycle products like plastic, in the hugely successful blue programs, among others, and Jansen said it's time that the recycled plastics are put to better use, to encourage further recycling.

“It's most of all an educational tool, reaching the kids when they are young,” he said. “And from a maintenance standpoint, there is also a challenge for the schools to repair and to replace. Plastic products have five times the lifespan of wooden ones and the school with a set budget can have products it doesn't have to worry about maintaining.”

Indeed, it's virtually impossible to carve visible hearts in today's plastic school benches, because their color permeates the entire product mass, and because plastic is not porous, graffiti from spray cans can be taken off much more easily.

Wishbone now carries three main product lines, by manu facturers Cascade Products, reusing post consumer plastic waste for municipal furniture, dimensional lumber and decking; Xpotential Products, reusing plastics from automobiles for such items as landscape ties and curb stops; and Polyboard, reusing industrial plastic waste for plastic sheeting.

Wishbone started out as a venture in Chase, B.C., seven years ago, to provide plastic products for back yards, and it was soon bought out by others who were seeing to provide decorative and memorial benches for municipalities. The quality of plastic that originally had presented problems in uniformity of material consistency, improved, especially with technologies perfected in Europe. Plastics were being converted into dimensional lumber in European countries that were experiencing growing populations, disappearing forests and over-full landfills.

“They took milk cartons, yogurt containers and ice cream buckets, and tested them, finding a certain consistency in consumer-based plastic,” Jansen recalled. “We soon became one of the factories larger customers realizing the applications would become an ideal product for building use - decks, etc. - with exposure to western moisture and termites.”

Wishbone began selling products made from this European technology and found success in its installation,

much as in vinyl siding, where completely different physical characteristics than wood had to be considered.

The company found a serious challenge in the local lumber industry, with its strong government support, but it was undaunted. “It takes 40 years to grow a tree and it's not as recyclable as it could be,” Jansen said.

“All our products are made from a variety of recycled plastics,” he said, “and although the industry has made several advancements in colors, dimensional and nominal lumber sizing, we need to keep reminding ourselves that they are recycled plastic and react different ways under a variety of circumstances. Although it looks like wood, it's not! Careful consideration needs to be made regarding expansion, contraction and spanning distances to ensure it performs to its maximum benefit. Not taking these into consideration can produce is some cases disastrous results. We've taken the guesswork out of it so now you can enjoy this maintenance free environmentally friendly product for years to come.”

Forging ahead, Wishbone now has product placements over a wide area of western Canada and the United States. Their products are being recognized by several school districts already with growth last year in selling memorial benches, that often have come about in fundraising programs, portable skate ramps for gyms, sheeting on lacrosse boxes, and parameter edging around play areas.