The creator of Abusca Design, Alain Buscarlet, has been working with concrete for over 30 years. The artist who started as a sculptor has worked as an industrial designer teacher for 11 years at École Nationale Supérieure de la Cambre, in Brussels. Then he taught interior design at Université de Montréal, Faculté d’aménagement.
After the success of his first prototypes, he founded Abusca in 1996 to develop and market his product lines. Holder of a Master’s degree in Fine Arts, Alain Buscarlet continues to emphasize on creativity and is always looking for fresh new approaches and original products to satisfy his clients.
Thanks to new techniques related to the use of traditional materials, Abusca has developed, with the help of multinational companies such as Ciment St-Laurent S.A. and Hydraulic Press Brick Company, an advanced technology allowing to guarantee the lightness and the inalterability of its products. Entirely recyclable, the components are ecological.
The use of a particular type of expanded shale, combined with extensive endurance tests, has enabled the company to gain irreplaceable experience in the use of these raw materials.
Highly appreciated in environments with extreme or variable climates for its qualities such as impermeability, durability and resistance to fire and to chemical and biological elements, our technology tends to become systematically sought after by designers as well as by contractors. The use of aerated reinforcements can allow a further relief of the original models as well on those of series.
Description
Initially, the products made by Abusca were limited to different concepts of modular furniture (tables)and to some lighting elements; since 2000, an important sector consisting of kitchen counters, vanities, sinks and washbasins has been added.
Environmental assessment:
In addition to technological and aesthetic considerations, the production of concrete furniture and countertop elements (recycled and recyclable) should reduce the environmental pressure due to:
It is also a question of replacing these products of nature by a natural material, recomposed, 100% recyclable, insensitive to aging and whose transformation into finished products through the polymerization of cement by water supply does not involve any synthetic product (no glue or other formaldehyde).
Objective and relative energy consumption assessment: The only significant energy consumption related to Abusca products is related to cement production. It is often a recycling consumption, since cement factories are burning many industrial waste (used tires, PCBs, electric poles, creosote wood – etc.) at very high temperatures and virtually without discharge. It should be noted, however, that the need of our business for cement is derisory compared to the entire industry’s production. Apart from the normal consumption of a company, we can speak of a virtually zero energy impact.
Consequences on the environment: We can already conclude that the effects on the environment, in terms of pollution induced by Abusca’s production are positive: the company does not consume energy, or very little, and is replacing materials sometimes toxic (especially in the case of agglomerated wood) and with a strong ecological footprint, by natural materials recycled / recyclable and potentially unalterable.
