UPPAREL Wins a Good Design Award Best in Class for UPtex: The End of Single-Use Signage

What theGood Design Awards stand for

The Australian Good Design Awards are the country’s most respected mark of design excellence, and Best in Class is the highest honour a category can give. Entrants can’t win it on a pitch. Instead, an independent expert jury tests every entry on three things: is it genuinely good design, is it truly innovative, and does it deliver measurable, lasting impact.

That’s why this win matters to us. We’re not a design studio. Rather, we’re a textile recycler that set out to solve a waste problem and ended up designing a product the jury judged the best in its field. In short, it proves that circular thinking can out-design the status quo, not just match it.

The design stage determines up to 80% of a product’s environmental impact. Because of this, you can’t recycle your way out of a badly designed system. That’s why we built UPtex to design the waste out from the start.

The problem with signage

Every year, businesses print, use and bin virgin corflute signage. Manufacturers make it from plastic, produce it new for every campaign and rarely recover it. Print it, use it, throw it out. Repeat.

Meanwhile, Australians are among the world’s biggest textile consumers, and we ship most of that waste offshore to landfill or incineration. So we have two waste streams with no connection between them. Until UPtex.

 

How UPtex closes the loop

UPtex turns recycled textile waste into a durable, printable signage board. We engineered it on purpose-built machinery to match virgin corflute and beat it. Here’s what your business gets:

• A direct corflute replacement. UPtex has the same rigidity, durability and feel as corflute, and it comes in thicknesses from lightweight retail displays to heavy-duty signs. You make no compromise.
• Up to 16 print cycles. One board does the job of many, so you slash reorders and cut the cost and emissions of every new run.
• A genuinely closed loop. At end of life, boards come back to us. We defibre them and turn them into new signage, which means zero landfill.
• Fully onshore and traceable. Every step happens in Australia, so you can see and prove exactly where your material goes.

Each A1 UPtex sign prevents around 150kg of greenhouse gas emissions over its lifetime. Melbourne BMW was among the first to prove it in a retail setting, an industry first for sustainable signage.

What it means for Australia’s circular economy

Here’s the part that matters most. Every company that switches to UPtex sends its end-of-life textiles to us, and then gets them back as the signage on its own walls. As a result, waste that used to leave the country now stays onshore. It keeps material and value inside Australia’s economy instead of sending them to landfill overseas.

Moreover, a Best in Class win tells the market that circular materials aren’t the compromise option anymore. They’re the benchmark. Textile waste isn’t a problem to manage. It’s a resource waiting for the right design.

And we’re scaling. We’ve diverted more than 17.1 million kilograms of textiles from Australian landfill, and the AFR named us a finalist in its 2026 Sustainability Leaders Awards. In addition, we’re finalising new technology that will multiply our processing capacity tenfold. Consequently, we’ll recover more waste and put more UPtex into the world.

The end of single-use signage isn’t a slogan. It’s already happening, and your next campaign can be part of it.

Ready to make the switch? Talk to our Partnerships Team about UPtex signage for your brand.

Frequently asked questions

What is a Good Design Award Best in Class?
Best in Class is the highest honour within a category at the Australian Good Design Awards. It recognises the entry the independent jury rated strongest across Good Design, Design Innovation and Design Impact.

What is UPtex?
UPtex is a circular signage board that comes from 100% recycled textile waste. It replaces virgin corflute, and you can print it up to 16 times. Afterwards, you return it to UPPAREL and we remake it into new signage.

Is UPtex a good alternative to corflute?
Yes. UPtex matches corflute’s rigidity, durability and printability. In addition, you can reuse it across multiple print cycles, and we remanufacture it at end of life instead of sending it to landfill.

How does UPtex reduce emissions?
Each A1 UPtex sign prevents approximately 150kg of greenhouse gas emissions across its lifetime. It does this by replacing virgin plastic and reducing the number of new boards that need production.

Where does UPtex come from?
We make UPtex onshore in Australia at UPPAREL’s facility in Cranbourne West, Victoria. Furthermore, we trace every step from textile waste to finished board.

UPPAREL is Australia’s leading onshore textile recycler and a Certified B Corp. We turn end-of-life textiles into new materials like UPtex, keeping them in circulation and out of landfill, forever.