Button-fix: The small component with a big impact that improves the life-cycle assessment of your panels

The construction industry is a significant contributor to greenhouse gas emissions; life cycle and sustainability assessments are becoming increasingly important to specifiers and architects. Superficially, you may overlook products made from unrecycled thermoplastics, but Button-fix fasteners can help enormously from a sustainability point of view. Let’s explain how.

Consider the alternatives: hidden/filled screws and high-performance polymer adhesives are often used to attach panelling; both are very permanent solutions. However, when it is time for a re-fit, the panels, and often the substrate itself, will be destroyed and suitable only for landfill. Button-fix allows the re-use of both the panels and the Fixes, since they can be re-used, reconfigured, adapted, and repurposed. The substrate remains undamaged. Button-fix, therefore, becomes a ‘green enabler’, completely altering the life-cycle assessment of the building components.

If, instead, a polymer adhesive is used to mount the panels, it will have a greater volume per panel and, therefore, a more significant emissions impact than using Button-fix. Our relatively tiny Button and Fix (7.5 grams of glass-filled nylon for Type 1) can help prevent significantly more than its weight in plastic from going to waste.

If reconfigurability is considered in the design from the outset, it can revolutionize how the space is used, extend the building's life - and massively extend the ‘Use’ phase of the Life-Cycle Assessment. In this way, lifetime homes that are adaptable to meet the users’ changing needs become practical and achievable.

Looked at in these terms, Button-fix fasteners are probably worth their weight in gold!