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NATURALLY TOWARDS THE THREE DIMENSIONS OF ENVIRONMENTAL, ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL SUSTAINABILITY

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Stone, the first building material in history, meets humankind’s needs to give shape and structure to its living space.

Protection, functionality, safety, wellbeing, prestige and beauty are the demands that humankind has always made of natural stone.

And so people built villages and cities, roads and bridges, gardens and aqueducts, public and religious buildings, monuments and works of art.

All this “voluntary geography” testifies to a millenniums-old tradition of design, creativity, use, artisanship and techniques for working stone: a material that expresses the historically defined relationship between the natural environment and the anthropic, between nature and culture, according to principles of continuity, harmony and economy.

Hard stones and soft stones, pale stones and dark stones, stratified stones and the massive represent a universe of natural geodiversity that has contributed to structuring and designing our landscape.

Today, when the equilibrium of this relationship, felt as need and duty, is again at the center of the most advanced thinking about the culture of designing and building, authentically natural stone regains its role of leader among the building materials available as one of the best suited to interpret the current and urgent demands for sustainability and environmental protection.

According to United Nations estimates, from now until 2050 more than two-thirds of the global population will live in cities. Even right now, 60% of total energy consumption and 70% of emissions are connected to “urban consumption”.

That is why the quality of the constructed is one of the decisive factors in the struggle against climate change.

Today authentically natural stone can be at the service of creating a low-environmental-impact urban ecosystem that is comfortable, durable, hospitable and beautiful.

One of the most dynamic sectors of the made in Italy, the Italian stone/techno-stone industry ended 2021 with revenue of more than 4 billion euros, nearly 3 billion of them in exports, and an active trade balance of 2.5 billion, returning to pre-pandemic levels thanks primarily to the driving force of foreign sales. With more than 3200 companies, the sector employs some 34,000 people, even in periods of crisis showing economic and occupational stability.

A long history behind them and know-how handed down from generation to generation enable Italian stone companies to offer the national and international markets refined products sought after for their great physical and aesthetic qualities.

At the dawn of the third millennium, sustainability is the new demand to which the entire sector of authentically natural stone is able respond.

The PNA-Pietra Naturale Autentica (Authentically Natural Stone) network, comprising the most representative companies in the Italian stone/techno-stone industry – made up of producers and processors of marbles, granites and natural stones in general, and makers of machines, installations, tools and complementarity products, and private organizations – intends to valorize the principles of economic, social and environmental sustainability and the circular economy that authentically natural stone can provide, with its positive impact on the whole building industry and its leading role in the process of ecological transition.

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NATURALLY SUSTAINABLE TO ACHIEVE THE SDGS OF THE PARIS AGREEMENT

Through the United Nations’ Agenda 2030, the international community adopted a charter of concrete objectives and shared commitments to promote sustainable development globally.

Energy efficiency, reduction of CO2 emissions, optimization of water resources, circular economy, protection of biodiversity, human dignity and dignity of labor, social and territorial cohesion are the fundamental pillars on which all action is based. Italian natural stone companies intend to actively participate in reaching sustainability goals in relation to their specific area of work:

  • SDG 12 – Responsible production and consumption
    Extracting only what is needed, planning quarry extraction and executing it in full respect for the environment, increasingly refining work technologies, developing best circular economy practices to utilize ornamental stone and all the material extracted generally, taking care of the landscapes of quarrying sites during extraction and recouping them when work is finished. These are the ambitious goals that PNA intends to pursue to define the model for knowledgeable and responsible natural stone production.
  • SDG 11 – Inclusive, safe, enduring and sustainable cities and human settlements
    Natural stone, because of its durability, thermic performance, absence of harmful emissions even while working it, its ability to be recycled and recouped after use, its utilization for good rainwater management, resistance to external agents and unique beauty, helps to limit the environmental impact of urban contexts and improve the quality of life of the communities living in them.
  • SDG 8 – Dignified work and economic growth
    Safe workplaces and responsible management of critical factors are fundamental conditions for achieving the wellbeing of all employees in the stone sector, committed to ensuring the necessary measures for safety, welfare, inclusion, anti-discrimination of whatever type, training and continual updating, also on topics related to the reduction of the entire industry’s environmental impact.
  • SDG 13 – Climate action
    With a concentration of CO2 in the air 48% higher than in the pre-industrial period, actively combatting climate change is the biggest challenge for sustainable development. Using natural stone in building – guaranteeing the energy efficiency of buildings and hygrometric balance, the healthiness of living- and workplaces, and respect for biodiversity – are concrete actions to mitigate climate-changing emissions. A mitigation that is also found in the extraction cycle for authentically natural stone, which has fewer CO2 emissions than are generated by other, “non-natural” building materials.
  • SDG 17 – Partnership for goals
    Promoting knowledge of the characteristics and uses for different types of stones, providing a platform for information exchange with user interaction and meta-language to increase knowledge about the sustainability of natural stone, incentivizing research and innovation in the stone sector and fostering the spread of best circular economy practices for discards are the challenges shared by all stone sector companies. Dealing with them in a synergetic, coordinated way through the involvement and commitment of all actors in the industry and in the design and construction worlds has been a priority aim of PNA since its founding.

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NATURALLY SUSTAINABLE TOWARDS ESG CRITERIA MEASUREMENT

Companies’ commitment to sustainable development is described and measured by ESG criteria, non-financial parameters that valorize corporate performance from the Environmental, Social and Governance standpoints.

Defining corporate identity according to the principles of environmental, economic and social sustainability corresponds to a broader model of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), which includes the ability to associate profit with creation of measurable social worth.

Reducing waste, pollution and CO2 emissions, guaranteeing equal opportunity, ensuring the health, safety and needs of people and fairly remunerating their work, combatting corruption, structuring a company’s core business and making all these principles corporate assets, are strategic choices that describe a company durably oriented towards growth.

The obligation foreseen in non-financial accountability, the new European taxonomy that classifies eco-sustainable work towards ecological transition, together with ESG ranking (which helps define the worth, also economic, of organizations), are new competitive factors for companies, that in this way become more attractive for consumers, stakeholders and investors.

The authentically natural stone sector intends to meet ESG requirements in terms of energy and water consumption, the circular economy of byproducts and discards, the wellbeing of employees and positive fallout for communities.

Energy consumption: quarrying and processing authentically natural stone using ever more energy from renewable sources along with technologies made in Italy with a high degree of energy efficiency is gradually reducing the sector’s carbon footprint.

Water consumption: optimizing use of hydric resources and suitably treating the amounts needed for work in the stone sector, reusing refluent water as much as possible and purifying the water released into the environment are sustainability goals for the entire sector. Increasingly reducing the use of blue water, utilizing green waters to the maximum and limiting, if not eliminating, the discharge of grey water are concrete actions that companies have been engaged in for years, especially when they are equipped with modern and efficient water-treatment plants made in Italy.

Discard reduction: the byproducts produced by quarrying and processing stone, their management and containment of their environmental impact are a new factor of competition and development for the whole sector. Following circular economy principles, research and technological innovation are directed towards valorizing different types of discards and byproducts to make them become secondary raw materials.

Environmental restoration of extraction site: planning quarry management in view of its recuperation and subsequent work to re-naturalize or valorize the site makes it possible to restore decommissioned sites more easily, containing the environmental impact of all extraction work.

Reducing cutting thicknesses: reducing the thicknesses of cutting tools, combined with increasingly high-performance and innovative cutting methods, makes it possible to limit work waste, calculated in Kg/square meter, and energy consumption calculated in kWatt/square meter, of cut stone material.

Workplace safety and protection: adopting measures protecting sector employees in their physical and mental health, implementing corporate welfare, training and continual skills updating means significantly and actively promoting wellbeing as an integral part of company organization. Remote-control and Industry 4.0 technologies are currently present in most Italian stone companies.

Positive impact on local communities: valorizing the amount of material extracted and processed in nearby industrial districts and expertise in working it means making stone extraction, defined as a factor of economic, social and cultural development, into a process of cohesion and identity able to involve the entire community.

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NATURALLY SUSTAINABLE TOWARDS ENVIRONMENTAL REGENERATION

The inevitable localization of stone extraction is the main characteristic of stone companies. A characteristic that entails the need to contain the impact on the environment and landscape of the places where natural stone is extracted.

For a sector company, commitment to sustainable development means not only respecting the increasingly frequent and cogent standards that regulate extraction work but also managing production according to an identified and shared principle of collective environmental responsibility that focuses on respect for places and communities from the perspective of their essential recuperation and regeneration.

If the ratio between global stone extraction and ornamental stone and between the discards created and those recycled combines to define the sustainability of stone production – for the purpose of reducing discards and reusing them as secondary raw materials – so the recuperation of quarry sites is the true completion of the circle once extraction work has ended.

The main goal is to re-establish the equilibrium of the ecosystem, but there are also good examples of recouping decommissioned quarries for different public uses, such as creating natural amphitheaters, exhibition areas or sites that can preserve and hand down legacies of local industrial archeology and help the site’s other production traditions.

Listening to and involving citizens and local institutions in regeneration projects concerning how they should be done and for what purposes is an indispensable act of cohesion, with positive fallout on local communities from the standpoint of corporate social responsibility that, in a structured way, valorizes a company’s social action.

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NATURALLY SUSTAINABLE TOWARDS INNOVATION, RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT

Knowing the environmental impact of a product and its effects on human health during its lifecycle – which goes from production, with all its transport stages, down to use and final disposal – is today a decisive factor in making knowledgeable and responsible decisions in a perspective of truly sustainable development.

The Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is the study that examines and measures a product’s (a good or service’s) interactions with the environment, from analyzing the raw materials down to their final disposal and/or recycling, thus clarifying its overall environmental impact and also making possible comparison with other, similar products, on the basis of shared and certified standards and parameters.

To promote ever deeper knowledge of the environmental impact of natural stones – by now indispensable to better qualified and sustainable design and building choices – PNA commissioned the Turin Polytechnic to draft an LCA analysis for the average “authentically natural stone slab” and a preview of the consequent EPD (Environmental Product Declaration) in conformance with the guidelines set for stone products.

Defining the framework of the LCA analysis system entails individuating the stages and processes to be included: as traditionally conceived, this means considering a product’s entire lifecycle, from purchase of the raw material to its management at the end of its useful life, including the stages of manufacture, marketing and use, down to the end of its life (whether from demolition and/or disposal and/or recycling, according to the cradle-to-grave approach).

In our specific case, given the particularities of the lifecycle for authentically natural stone, the analysis is “from cradle to gate”, concluding with the finished product deposited on the work bay, ready for its destination market.

Making the LCA analysis available enables authentically natural stone companies to increase their competitiveness under the banner of certified sustainability.

As an intrinsically circular and wholly recuperable material (both for discards from the upstream production process and for demolition materials downstream), natural stone can also be analyzed through a “cradle to cradle” LCA able to restore its nature as a product “that never dies” because it is 100% reusable practically to infinity.

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NATURALLY SUSTAINABLE TOWARDS THE CIRCULAR ECONOMY OF WASTE

A commitment to reducing waste to a minimum, in extraction and in processing, is the first form of respect for natural stone. For the entire stone sector ZERO STONE WASTE is a concrete goal that can be soon achieved.

The discards that the sector produces every year in the form of stone pieces of various sizes, like shapeless or defective blocks in the quarry, remnants of blocks after cutting, shards, fragments and powders deriving from processing muds, currently find use in recycling processes as secondary raw materials only in part, in addition to having very high economic and environmental costs.

The circular economy challenge in the stone sector is that of valorizing all discards and promoting an ever-wider use of them, working in symbiosis with other industrial and productive businesses, helping to define a short circular chain for natural stones able to also have positive occupational fallout on extraction and processing territories.

The marketing of byproducts, waste products and natural stone derivatives not only reduces economic and environmental costs but also provides additional resources to newly invest in research and development, following a logic of virtuous circularity.

The green transition of the stone sector necessitates implementing processes with a high degree of technological innovation stemming from research projects

involving private companies and universities, but above all must be based on the impulse and synergic strategy of associations, consortiums and organizations able to leverage the excellence of the Italian stone sector and take it towards ever greater sustainability.

The ZERO STONE WASTE project, coordinated by the International Marble Institute (IS.I.M), following European Directive 2008/98/CE End of Waste, is aimed at recouping and using derivatives and discards from processing ornamental stones by perfecting suitable processing methods and specific production technologies acquirable by sector companies.

ZERO STONE WASTE promotes the reduction, tending to elimination, of discard conferral costs to arrive at proposing new building materials, all MEC (Minimum Environmental Criteria) declarable for their high content of recycled and recouped stone byproducts.

On the basis of the type of discards it produces, every company can find in the technologies perfected by the project a “customized” response to its circular production needs.

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NATURALLY SUSTAINABLE TOWARDS THE GREEN STANDARDS OF PLANNING AND CONSTRUCTION

In Europe, buildings and the building sector are responsible for 36% of annual CO2 emissions, 40% of energy consumption, 21% of potable water use and 50% of raw materials extraction.

In sustainable building and green building, natural stone plays a primary role as a material making it possible to create and design an authentic urban ecosystem of great environmental quality in which natural matrixes, semi-natural matrixes and human intervention can dialogue functionally and positively.

The main guarantees that natural stone offers are:

  • Respect for biodiversity: paving for pedestrian paths for open spaces and gardens made with natural stone can protect and create specific tracts of biodiversity. Utilizing stone for urban roofing guarantees high environmental quality.
  • Control of amounts of rainwater:  authentically natural stones can provide partially permeable pavements that mitigate rainwater flooding.
  • Reduction of heat islands: various types of natural stone, skillfully used for external pavements, building roofs and parking lots, can minimize the impact of the surrounding microclimate.
  • Maximization of energy savings in building management: thanks to the different minerals they contain, using authentically natural stones can help reduce energy consumption for heating and cooling buildings, with a consequent reduction in CO2 emissions.
  • Extension of existent buildings’ lifecycles: authentically natural stones are “eternal” if used in ways consonant with weather conditions and their performance characteristics and if given simple maintenance using modern methods of surface treatment and restoration. Their use makes it possible to preserve resources, conserve cultural assets and reduce waste.
  • The ability to recoup/recycle at end-of-life: discards of authentically natural stone deriving from demolition and construction generate secondary raw materials of excellent quality and can be reused as ornamental coverings after simple surface treatment, to produce both aggregates and stabilizers for the building world.

For this reason, a slab of authentically natural stone, once certified with an EPD (Environmental Product Declaration) can contribute to the sustainability rating of buildings based on the latest international certification systems: LEED, BREEAM, ENERGY STAR, GREEN STAR, HQE, ITACA.

Making it possible to reduce the amount of construction and demolition materials, to save raw materials and energy and to limit CO2 emissions, the use of natural stones can also meet the sustainability requisites demanded of secondary construction materials according to MEC for public administration buildings.

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NATURALLY SUSTAINABLE TOWARDS WELL-BEING, HEALTH AND SAFETY IN LIVING AND WORKING ENVIRONMENTS

Increasingly widespread environmental awareness, when it meets the most advanced design and building culture, orients itself towards choosing natural materials as a guarantee of comfortable homes that respect the environment while saving energy and resources.

The intrinsic qualities of authentically natural stone in fact contain all the properties that, depending on the type of performance required of it, ensure the safety, comfort and beauty of the spaces in which it is used.

The thermic properties of stone materials make it possible to save energy on heating/cooling rooms, at the same time contributing to their hygrometric balance; their nearly total absence of harmful emission ensures their healthiness; their sound-absorbing capacity helps combat the noise pollution ever more common in cities; their durability and resistance to wear through time make natural stones eternal materials ever easier to maintain thanks to modern processing and polishing techniques.

Without forgetting that these characteristics combine with circular economy principles for extending the lives of buildings built with natural stone, for urban regeneration and for combatting the deterioration of common spaces, for the restoration – cultural as well – of the prestigious architectural assets created with natural stone.

Choosing marbles, granites, travertines, sandstones and quartzites through knowledge of their material and performance characteristics means building a stable, inviting and hospitable urban landscape, a depository of the social, historical and cultural values of the community inhabiting it, and consigning to future generations mementos of today’s architecture, in the most classic or bolder and more innovative designs.

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NATURALLY SUSTAINABLE FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF “MADE IN ITALY”

In Italy – famous worldwide for the beauty of its natural and urban landscapes and for its refined and elegant lifestyle – natural stone has always been the “material” par excellence combining functional and aesthetic principles.

Along with its gifts of resistance, uniqueness, aesthetic yield and durability, natural stone also embodies the potential tied to technological innovations that can be of service to architectural and design projects imprinted with quality, wellbeing and beauty.

This is the added value of natural stones: their unique identity, their marvelous materiality and the expertise of Italian know-how, interpreted by the latest stone-working techniques and the artisanal and industrial capabilities of Italian companies.

Expertise that from Renaissance workshops has developed to the present day, working on and developing an Italian way of valorizing stone that is recognized the world over.

From premium marbles for interior furnishings to the stones most suitable for external uses and to upgrade and decorate urban spaces, the history of Italian quality and its regional and local specificities passes through the exportation of authentically natural stones.

With an international market comprising more than 140 countries, whose major buyers are the United States, Germany, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, France, the United Arab Emirates and China, the stone sector is an ideal testimonial to the synthesis of the Made in Italy, which concerns premium, world-renowned materials and the Italian way of working them, fruit of ancient traditions and the most advanced and innovative applied technology, as demonstrated by the sector’s involvement in the creation of technical and research centers as part of international cooperation agreements.

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NATURALLY SUSTAINABLE TOWARDS CORPORATE RESPONSIBILITY IN NEW RELATIONSHIP ECONOMICS

Promoting the culture of using and working with natural stones in the building and design sectors is the mission of the Pietra Naturale Autentica network as a project that brings together the sector’s leading companies.

In addition to organization into local and regional production districts, the aggregation of stone sector companies into a nationwide network becomes a decisive competitive factor for the entire sector, facing the most urgent challenges of sustainable development and the goals defined by ecological transition.

In fact, PNA helps promote and disseminate the culture of authentically natural stone among architects, designers and technical consultants so that stone materials can be increasingly a part of ideas offered clients and together create a roster of proposals, of research and the definition of sustainability for the entire sector from the standpoint of continual improvement to reduce environmental impact and foster greater cohesion with territories and communities.

PNA, thus responding to SDG 17 – which pinpoints partnerships as a governance model – intends to make its own contribution to the contents of economic, social and environmental sustainability, to adoption of ESG criteria, to research and development and technological innovation, to valorizing the unique and inimitable characteristics of natural stone, to reducing the environmental impact of quarrying and processing and to promoting and disseminating the circular economy of stone discards, as a systemic vision and direction towards saving resources and energy.

 

Naturally, together.

Design & communication: Danae Project | Press office: mariachiara@mediatike.it

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