Because every single component is designed to be disassembled and reused, no waste is produced at any stage of a building’s lifecycle.
Approximately half of all New Zealand's waste—about 1.6 million tonnes every year—is generated by the construction sector.
The current widespread use of adhesive-based fixings and single-life materials means that building a single new home will create about four tonnes of waste during construction, and even more when it’s eventually demolished and taken to the landfill.
A Victoria University of Wellington architecture student—Ged Finch—is working with Wellington UniVentures to commercialise a game-changing building design that has the potential to eliminate waste and reduce the amount of raw materials being used by the building industry.
His idea centres around a framing system that can be disassembled and re-used at the end of a building’s useful life—an architectural solution he hopes will transition the building sector from a linear (take, make, dispose) economy to a circular economy—where materials are reused in endless cycles.
Features and benefits
Zero waste
Easy to assemble
The self-braced, interlocking design enables pieces of wood to simply clip together like flat-pack furniture, enabling rapid assembly/disassembly using unskilled labour and a bare minimum of tools.
Easy to customise
The clip-together design means that any type of structure—floors, walls, ceilings—can be created, while adding doors or windows - and even additional rooms - is made simple.
Wellington Gold Awards 2021
WGA Text
The Wellington Gold Awards honour the region’s business talent and pays tribute to those who are building the Wellington community. X-Frame was named as a finalists in the Innovation Gold category.
Watch their entry video here.
Video link
Next steps
We supported Ged and the team to form a spinout company, XFrame Australia, in 2019. Nine months after establishing the Australian entity, and after the construction of multiple larger scale prototype projects in South Australia, XFrame completed its maiden capital raise in late 2020.
Since then, the team has grown their in-house technical capabilities and delivered multiple demonstrations and prototypes around Australia and New Zealand.
XFrame is now beginning to scale project delivery capabilities in Australia through a partnership with Smith Management Group (SMG). Having completed a follow-up seed capital raise in January 2022, XFrame is rapidly approaching broad market release.
