ReFrame questions, answered — materials, sourcing and carbon

ReFrame is AOSA’s modular trade show display system: flat-pack, tool-free, and designed so the frame is kept and reused while only the printed graphics change between events. It is designed and fabricated by AOSA in Huntington Beach, California.

There are two builds. ReFrame Indoor pairs a hardwood plywood structure with printed Falcon Board graphic panels for halls, showrooms and retail interiors. ReFrame Outdoor uses UV-cured, clear-coated hardwood plywood finished on both faces for storefronts, patios and pop-ups. When neither fits, AOSA builds a custom version on the same platform.

About 12 minutes for a backwall — one person, no tools. Everything ships flat and arrives ready to build. There is no crew, no rigging and no tool kit, and each module is light enough to hand-carry into the hall.

Each backwall module is 38″ wide × 88″ high × 20″ deep. Three modules make a standard 10 ft backwall; six make a 20 ft.

You can start with a single wall and add modules later — the system is designed to be added to rather than replaced.

Displays start at $395 for a narrow shelf and $450 for an outdoor A-frame. Backwall modules start at $690 each, and a full configuration runs to roughly $6,400 depending on size, finish and how much print coverage you choose.

Standard maple is the included finish; ebony, mahogany and custom faux veneers cost more.

Standard orders ship in 5–10 business days after artwork approval. Custom ReFrame builds typically take 3–6 weeks.

No. Send print-ready files if you have them, or add Art Generation ($150) and AOSA builds them for you — most artwork is turned around within an hour.

The indoor system uses Falcon Board, which is rated for indoor use only — do not leave it outdoors.

ReFrame Outdoor is the version built for it: hardwood plywood with a UV-cured clear coat on both faces. Sandbags ($25 a pair, shipped unfilled) ballast outdoor stands against wind.

That is the point of it. The frame stays; the printed panels come off and new ones go on.

Reprints, replacement panels, repair parts and finish upgrades all go through ReFrame Restock & Repair.

Yes. AOSA reshapes the ReFrame platform around the brief — brainstorm in person or over Zoom — and custom builds can go from outreach to installed in as little as two weeks; larger ground-up builds typically take 3–6 weeks. A custom build stays flat-pack, tool-free and reusable like every ReFrame.

For example, Orange County United Way needed ten house-form story podiums for a traveling photo exhibit, delivered two weeks from the first conversation. Start at Custom ReFrame.

Designed and fabricated by AOSA in Huntington Beach, California.

Yes. The ReFrame Reuse Marketplace lists pre-owned booths, exhibits and components that independent resale partners already have for sale, with direct links to each seller.

AOSA is a facilitator only: it doesn’t own, hold or sell those booths, takes no payment and no finders fee, and every sale is arranged with the partner.

No. Those booths were built by many different manufacturers from materials AOSA can’t verify, so there is no honest way to put a number on them. AOSA’s carbon figures cover only what AOSA makes — ReFrame.

What reuse does guarantee is that the materials and manufacturing behind a booth that already exists are not repeated.

Cost and carbon. A booth that already exists has had its materials, its manufacturing and its freight to the first show already spent; reusing it avoids repeating any of that.

The trade-off is real: you take the structure as it was built, arrange your own graphics and freight, and live with the configuration the previous owner ordered.

Columbia Forest Products MPX — a ¼″ nominal, HP-1 grade hardwood plywood with an all-wood veneer core, assembled at Columbia’s mill in Klamath Falls, Oregon.

• Core (about 85% of the panel): yellow poplar veneer, peeled at Columbia’s Craigsville, West Virginia mill from logs cut within roughly 100 miles
• Face and back veneers (about 15%): decorative hardwood sliced at Columbia’s Newport, Vermont mill from logs cut within roughly 150 miles — New England, the Upper Great Lakes and southeastern Canada

It is bonded with Columbia’s soy-based PureBond® formaldehyde-free technology and finished with a three-layer UV-cured acrylate coating on both faces.

Yes. PureBond is a formaldehyde-free adhesive made mainly from soy flour grown in the U.S. Midwest (about 1.5 lb per panel), and the panels comply with the U.S. EPA’s TSCA Title VI formaldehyde-emission rule and California’s CARB standard (Columbia’s TSCA / CARB certificates).

Columbia’s California Prop 65 disclosure covers wood dust, which is released when wood is sawn, sanded or machined (Prop 65 notice). AOSA does all the cutting in its own shop, so ReFrame arrives finished.

Columbia sells through distribution with Lacey Act assurances — the U.S. law against trading illegally harvested wood — and says it controls its wood sources to identify and remove any illegal wood that enters its supply chain. The wood comes from North American forests.

Columbia is employee-owned (an ESOP), and its core labor policy rules out child labor, forced labor, discrimination and retaliation against labor organizers.

No. MPX is made from 100% virgin wood — Columbia reports zero recycled content under ISO 14021. What makes ReFrame a reuse product is the design: the frame is kept and only the graphic panels are replaced between shows.

Not in the way a pine plantation is — and they don’t need to be. The poplar core and the face veneers are Appalachian and northern hardwoods. When one is cut, the stump sends up new sprouts from its existing root system and nearby trees reseed the ground; one sprout takes the lead and typically becomes a well-established young tree within the first decade.

That is why Columbia can’t give a “trees replanted” number for this product.

Yes, over time. The finish is UV-cured, not UV-blocking: Columbia deliberately leaves out UV-blocking chemistry so the wood ages like any other natural wood, lightening or darkening with sun exposure depending on the species.

The coating does help against incidental moisture, but ReFrame is water resistant, not waterproof — store outdoor pieces dry and out of the weather between uses.

No. Columbia can supply this plywood as FSC® Mix, but a product can only carry an FSC claim if every company handling it — mill, distributor and AOSA — holds an unbroken FSC chain-of-custody certificate. AOSA does not hold one today, so ReFrame is not sold as FSC-certified.

For smaller fabricators FSC offers group certification, which lowers the cost of getting there.

Falcon Board is the rigid, paper-based board used for ReFrame’s indoor graphic panels, shelves and some structural parts. It is made by Packaging Corporation of America (PCA).

PCA reports that its mills use U.S. wood fiber almost exclusively (under 1% from Canada), that 99% of it comes from trained loggers, and that every ton meets SFI Fiber Sourcing, PEFC Controlled Sources and FSC Controlled Wood requirements at minimum — standards that screen out illegally harvested and other controversial wood. About 31% comes from certified forests.

Those forests are mostly managed stands of native species that regenerate naturally, plus replanted native pine in the U.S. South.

It is made from paper fiber, the same material stream as corrugated cardboard — which the U.S. recycled at a rate of 91.4% in 2021, according to PCA’s report. Whether your local program takes printed board varies, so check before you put it out.

PCA has set targets from a 2021 baseline: a 35% cut in its scope 1 and 2 emissions by 2030, a 60% cut across scopes 1, 2 and 3 by 2040, and net-zero emissions by 2050.

Most of the energy its mills use already comes from wood residue that can’t be made into paper — renewable fuel was about 63% of PCA’s total energy use in 2022.

Line by line. Each product is split into the materials that go into it — Columbia MPX hardwood plywood, Falcon Board graphic panels and packaging — and the production steps AOSA runs in its own shop: UV LED flatbed printing, CO₂ laser cutting and knife cutting.

Each material is the quantity bought × a published emission factor. Each production step is the machine’s run time × its power draw × the EPA eGRID2023 emission factor for California’s grid (CAMX, 0.195 kg CO₂e per kWh), where AOSA’s shop runs. The lines are added together to give one figure in kg CO₂e per unit.

• Backwall module: 9.915 kg CO₂e — a standard 10 ft backwall is 3 modules, 29.746 kg CO₂e
• Double-sided banner stand: 9.842 kg CO₂e
• Podium: 8.164 kg CO₂e
• Wide display shelf: 8.275 kg CO₂e
• Narrow display shelf: 7.370 kg CO₂e
• Outdoor A-frame: 7.834 kg CO₂e
• Outdoor banner stand: 10.180 kg CO₂e

Figures are for the single-sided base configuration and are cradle-to-gate. Each product page breaks its figure down line by line.

Included: raw material supply, transport to the mill and manufacturing of the plywood, Falcon Board and packaging (life-cycle stages A1–A3), plus the electricity used to print and cut each piece in AOSA’s shop.

Excluded: freight to you, installation travel, storage, the use phase, and end-of-life disposal or recycling.

• Plywood: 219.32 kg CO₂e per m³ (stages A1–A3) from the AWC / CWC North American Softwood Plywood EPD (2020), applied to the volume of each ¼″ sheet
• Falcon Board: 1.5 kg per sheet × 1.20 kg CO₂e per kg — the cradle-to-gate figure for U.S. industry-average corrugated product from the 2020 life cycle assessment (NCASI for the Corrugated Packaging Alliance, 2023)
• Packaging: itemized — carton, bubble wrap, foam corners, wrap and tape — using the same paper-board factor and published plastics factors
• Electricity: EPA eGRID2023, California (CAMX) subregion, 0.195 kg CO₂e per kWh
• Machine power: UV flatbed 2.25 kW; CO₂ laser system 1.75 kW; Zünd G3 knife cutter 12.6 kW — the 3.6 kW rated draw of the cutter plus the 9 kW maximum of its vacuum, from Zünd’s G3 technical data. AOSA runs a full 48″ × 96″ bed, so the maximum is used

Every source is linked in the source documents below and in the Carbon transparency section of each product page.

No. Columbia Forest Products does not publish an Environmental Product Declaration for its plywood — it has chosen to invest in Declare® ingredient disclosure and TVOC emissions testing instead. That is why AOSA uses the industry-average AWC / CWC North American plywood EPD as the closest published proxy.

If Columbia or another supplier publishes a product-specific EPD, the plywood figure will be updated to use it.

Materials — 84% to 96% of the total on every product. Plywood is the largest single line on almost every product: about 42% of a backwall module or banner stand, 50–51% of the podium and wide shelf, and 53–61% of the outdoor pieces. Packaging comes next at 24–43%, and on the narrow shelf, which uses only half a sheet of plywood, packaging is the largest line. Falcon Board adds 11–24% on the indoor pieces.

Printing and cutting in AOSA’s shop make up the remaining 4–17%. Knife cutting is the biggest of those because the cutter’s vacuum table holds the board down while it cuts.

No. The wood figures report fossil-fuel emissions only, and biogenic carbon — the carbon the tree absorbed and the plywood still holds — is treated as neutral. AOSA claims no credit for it, which keeps the numbers conservative. That changes only if a supplier-specific EPD states otherwise.

It is a supplier-calculated estimate built for customer ESG, procurement and sustainability documentation — not a third-party verified product carbon footprint or EPD.

Supplier figures like this are typically reported under purchased goods and services (GHG Protocol Scope 3, Category 1). Whether an estimate meets your reporting standard is your auditor’s call, so the boundary, sources and exclusions are printed on every report.

Open the product page and scroll to Carbon transparency. Enter the quantity and the calculator multiplies it by the per-unit figure.

One-Page PDF / Print ESG Report opens a print-ready report with the order total, the line-by-line breakdown, the boundary and the sources. Choose “Save as PDF” in the print window.

Because it depends on where the order is going and how it travels, which isn’t known when the estimate is made. ReFrame ships flat-packed, which keeps the shipment small. To complete the picture, add your carrier’s emissions figure for the delivery.

Yes, per use. The footprint is created once, when the display is made, and every event it goes to afterwards spreads that same figure further.

New graphics don’t mean a new display: the frame stays and only the printed panels change. A full sheet of Falcon Board is 1.80 kg CO₂e in materials before printing, against 9.915 kg CO₂e for a complete backwall module.

They are estimates built on published, industry-average data, and three inputs are still assumptions: the plywood factor comes from a North American softwood plywood EPD (the closest published proxy — Columbia publishes no EPD for its MPX hardwood plywood), the Falcon Board sheet weight is estimated rather than weighed, and the knife cutter’s vacuum is taken at its 9 kW maximum rather than metered — so the cutting figures lean high.

The numbers will be updated as those are measured or as supplier-specific EPDs become available.

Yes. Two files, dated and updated whenever the product-page figures change:

• ReFrame carbon methodology & material data (PDF) — boundary, method, every emission factor with its source, line items for every product, supplier facts and the open assumptions
• ReFrame carbon line items (CSV) — every line item for every product, ready to drop into a spreadsheet or ESG tool

For an order-level report, open any product page, enter the quantity in the carbon calculator and use One-Page PDF / Print ESG Report. All the source documents are listed below.

Every source is listed in the source documents section at the bottom of this page — the plywood EPD, the U.S. corrugated life cycle assessment, EPA eGRID, the Zünd G3 technical data, Columbia Forest Products’ certificates and policies, and PCA’s responsibility report. AOSA’s own data files download directly; everything else links to the publisher, so you always get their current version.