Sustainability
Acustico Lighting worked with Tyre Stewardship Australia and Envirorubber to create an acoustic light using recycled tyres.
Illuminating a future for end-of-life tyres Acustico Lighting founder and director, Samantha McKenzie, was researching the viability of using recycled tyres in the design of her new collection when she came across Tyre Stewardship Australia.
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RIMARILY an interior designer, Samantha McKenzie formed Acustico Lighting in Melbourne to solve the issue of noisy spaces in office environments. On spending an initial two years in research and development, she found that a human-centred design approach for acoustic lighting was the way forward. Essentially, this meant a special type of lighting fixture that could absorb up to 30 per cent of sound. “I was working in commercial spaces and there seemed to be a problem with sound and people complaining about echoing boardrooms, or noisy breakout spaces, or open plan offices,” McKenzie said. “It was my intention from that point to go into some sort
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of manufacturing that would address sound and noise in those spaces. “I worked out that it was probably best to have a suspended solution, so lighting just made sense because that is something that is often suspended from the ceiling and is close to the source of the noise. I set about creating one particular product line, which was acoustic lighting, and we were lucky enough to win a gold Good Design Award for that first product in 2019.” More recently, with an influx of clients beginning to work from home due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Acustico Lighting founder came across a novel raw material that suited both residential and commercial environments – crumb from recycled car tyres.
Brutalis Collection Inspired by the brutalist architecture style that emerged in Europe following World War II, as well as the nature of design in historically austere periods, the concept for the Brutalis Collection was conceived. On receiving a Creative Victoria 2021 Sustaining Creative Workers grant, the product development process began. “I looked at an underlay for some flooring when we were in the middle of a building project, and I thought that recycled tyres could be good,” McKenzie said. “Then I started researching as to how I could go about working with that material, and I came across Envirorubber.” Envirorubber Solutions, a local specialist in prefabricated rubber
products that are made from recycled tyres, is focused on developing new applications to reuse discarded tyres. This aligned not only with McKenzie’s new project, but with Acustico Lighting’s underlying philosophy in ensuring sustainability in its products and processes. “The number one thing with everything that we do is to look back into the materials and where they come from,” McKenzie said. “There are some components in every design that can’t all be Australian made – particularly the LED lighting strip which just does not get made in Australia; so, there are elements that we can’t help importing. But the very fact that these tyres are from Australian trucks and cars was really important. Also, the fact that Manufacturers’ Monthly APRIL 2022 29
