Innovation in visual communication is not only about developing new materials. It is about expanding their potential and discovering new ways to use them. This approach has driven Guandong’s product development for almost twenty years, leading to a portfolio of specialist media designed to meet the evolving needs of the graphics industry while creating opportunities well beyond their original applications.
One of these solutions is Poly-rafia, a technical woven banner material originally developed for outdoor advertising. Weighing just 165 gsm, it combines exceptional tensile strength with outstanding mechanical resistance, outperforming many conventional banner materials while reducing weight by up to 70%. Designed for digital printing, Poly-rafia delivers excellent load-bearing performance together with an outstanding cost-to-performance ratio. Its lightweight construction makes transportation, handling and installation significantly easier without compromising durability, even in demanding large-format vertical installations. A 60 m² Poly-rafia banner, for example, weighs only 9 kg, compared with approximately 30 kg for conventional alternatives.
Poly-rafia expands beyond traditional banner use
Thanks to these characteristics, Poly-rafia is much more than an alternative to traditional PVC banners. While perfectly suited for most visual communication applications, its combination of strength, flexibility and impact resistance also opens the door to a wide range of industrial and protective uses. The material performs reliably in harsh outdoor environments and is increasingly being used for protective barriers at ski resorts and ice rinks, motocross tracks and other applications requiring lightweight yet highly resistant protection systems that are easy to transport and install.
“Every Guandong product starts with listening to the market,” says Fabio Elmi, Head of Research & Development at Guandong. “With Poly-rafia, we have developed a material that combines lightweight construction, mechanical strength, sustainability and excellent value for money. The result is a solution that not only expands the possibilities for visual communication but also creates new opportunities across completely different industries, demonstrating how material innovation can generate tangible value for our customers.”
Alongside its technical performance, Poly-rafia has been engineered with sustainability and end-of-life management in mind. Its woven structure is manufactured from a single polyolefin resin, eliminating the multiple resin layers typically found in conventional banner materials. This mono-material construction greatly simplifies the recycling process by removing the need to separate different material components. As a result, Poly-rafia is 100% recyclable, making recovery at the end of its service life both simpler and more cost-effective. Poly-rafia is part of GreenLife, Guandong’s product range dedicated to materials developed according to sustainability principles applied throughout the entire production and distribution process.
