To create new products for small companies in Tuscany we decided to work with local marble and stone factories, responding to the problem of waste production in this sector, by focusing on the re-use of a sawing byproduct. This powder – usually in the form of mud – is difficult to stock and highly expensive to dispose of it, for these reasons many manufacturers pour it into streams, damaging badly the local ecosystem. We suggested an enriched system, introducing a new stakeholder whose activity is to collect, clean and transform the waste into a raw material to be distributed. Our research aims to connect the marble and stone sector with the ceramic one through the creation of new experimental material, consisting of a mixture of clay and stone waste. These sectors have a long historical tradition in Tuscany, and both of them are now slowly disappearing: the objective was to generate an added and distributed value along the whole production chains.

The importance of Calcarea lies in the perspective of giving new aesthetic, social and economic relevance to marble and stone waste, by questioning the ways to reevaluate a material, and identifying the outputs that could be designed in relation to its features. Our work was focused on a small area, where the waste product was more than 100.000 tons per year. In other more extended territories, this amount is proportionally bigger. The improvement of this project would be an exciting challenge, from an economic point of view and, especially, from a sustainable perspective.