BentuDesign, an outstanding concrete furniture brand from China, is proud to announce that they have been awarded the highest distinction in the Red Dot Award: Best of the Best for the Concrete Wall Decoration Tiles – Shadow, tiles made of recycled concrete that consists of 50% disused ceramic as aggregate in cement. 

Recycling Ceramic Waste

There is the largest cluster of ceramic factories and the best developed ceramic product chain in Foshan, China. 4 million tons of ceramic waste and leftovers are produced annually and dumped illegally into urban villages and fishponds. Not to mention it is a costly move to deal with the land pollution, ceramic as a non-degradable material could occupy and pollute the land for a few hundreds years.

Recycling ceramic waste is not a news today. The traditional way of recycling was firstly to smash the ceramic into powder and then mix the powder into porcelain clay. Powder added into clay made the porcelain fires faster and reduced the clay required. However the quantity of powder acceptable was quite limited because it could lower the viscosity of clay and worsen the quality of product. Recycling massive ceramic waste by mixing powder into clay is still not practical. 
However they found that the gelation effect of cement is unaffected by ceramic aggregate and thus they carried out a brand new way of recycling ceramic waste. On this basis Shadow does not only achieved success on a new material but also made a spare effort to protect our environment from non-degradable ceramic waste.

Decoration

Wall tiles commonly seen often rely on color and wavy surface to serve for a decorative purpose but Shadow is uncommon.

With incredible formability of cement and learning from the principle of light and shadow imaging, this design stayed in a planar form but presented different shades of shadow with grooves of different depths and resulted in a visually three-dimensional effect that enhances the extensity and made the room more impressive. 

Style and Comment
Bentu believes that the greatest design may take no craft, just like the most interesting music such as 4’33’’ by John Cage does not have to bring a melody. They do not attach any symbol onto their product but let the material itself to speak for its own. The principle of their designing was simply let the form follows function with as least fancy moves as possible, so that the designs were free from all the unnecessary but meanwhile concise and elegant.
Professor Dr. Peter Zec, the founder and CEO of the Red Dot Award has commented: “Only design visionaries can achieve the perfect harmony between the quality of the function, seductiveness, use and responsibility. The award finds ground-breaking designs like these and makes them visible to the whole world.” (2017)

Specification for each tile
 – Size: 300*300*12 mm³
 – Weight: 2230 g
 
About BENTU
Bentu is an independent design brand founded in 2011, engaged in innovative designing and combined designing with manufacturing. They are an exploration team and also a laboratory. they even made products just to satisfy their necessary or casual needs, step by step from initial designing to final polishing. Through a series of experiments and exploration, they found the primeval feature of materials amazingly beautiful by revealing their original texture, quality and temperament.

What hides behind their attempt is their equal care for all – all the raw materials, techniques and cultures that make up things. For them there is no disparity between nobleness and lowliness, costliness and cheapness, neither treasures and trashes. Devoting theirselves into design could make dirt as priceless as the diamond. Even a straw or a handful of mud would shine when Bentu find their uses. There is not the best but only the fittest thing for any purpose. Everything they asked from the world were cherished.

Bentu focuses on the R&D, design, production and sales and promotion of products which varies from lighting, home furnishing, outdoor furniture, wall decors and so on. None of these was below of international standard. Most of their products are already certified to CCC, PSE, CE, ROHS2.0, SAA, C-TICK, FCC and IC. They have their own IPR and own more than 200 patents.