Flavio Marabelli – Why it is important to be part of a network like PNA

Good morning, I am Flavio Marabelli, Honorary President of Confindustria Marmomacchine, which is the trade association that represents the entire natural stone sector, both for materials and technology aspects.

We are currently in the stand of Pietra Naturale Autentica, an enterprise network whose foundation was strongly supported by Confindustria Marmomacchine. The natural stone sector is distinguished by a turnover that exceeds 4.5 billion euros every year; its export value exceeds 3 billion, and it enjoys a trade balance of 2.8 billion euros. It makes an important contribution to the Italian trade balance.

In this context, the materials segment and, therefore, also the aspect of the effective promotion of the product, the action of Pietra Naturale Autentica is perhaps the most valuable.

We are used to conceiving, to thinking about, and defending the interests of the natural stone industry, but there is a vast domain that is the application of stone in the world of architecture and design, which is precisely the purpose to which is dedicated Pietra Natura Autentica, which has been established to objectively promote the use of natural stone in the world, regardless of its origin, regardless of the type of final product.

This is an initiative that is absolutely new, established in the form of an enterprise network with legal personality and which has, for some years now, fostered the use of stone also in the project specification phase.

Initially, our task was to promote the beauty, peculiarities, and specificities of natural stone. More recently, we have been increasingly devoting ourselves to the aspects of sustainability, i.e. we are carrying out studies and promoting natural stone in terms of its sustainability compared to alternative products.

To achieve this, we chose to engage with architects and designers, because we realized that one of the main interests of stone users, in particular of architects, was the technical parametrization of natural stone, regardless of its classical features that we continue to promote, of course.

So, we adopted an approach that focuses on the sustainability of stone with respect to alternative materials, that is, those materials that in some way imitate the natural product, although they are not intrinsically natural.

Thus, in the last two years, we pursued the goal of demonstrating to our architects and designers that it is more appropriate to use a more sustainable product than others and we created this year, we completed this year, the first LCA in the Italian natural stone industry, demonstrating that the use of natural stone slabs is more sustainable, implies fewer CO2 emissions throughout its processing phase, compared to traditional alternative products that imitate the aesthetic qualities but are not natural, in other words, artificial imitations.

All this has been made possible through another peculiarity of the natural stone sector, which is the successful combination of product and technology.

This is a sector, that of the natural stone product, which offers us the possibility of profitably working with a product that comes from nature. As such, we do not create a product. Our task is to preserve the product and to use it in the most appropriate way and also to find processing solutions that ensure sustainability and that expand the scope of applications.

This is why this sector thrives on a continuous exchange of information and education about the product and its related technology. And it is also that combination that has provided us with a detailed corpus of data that has been decisive in sustainability assessment of the product compared to a natural product.

Because when you do an LCA (Life Cycle Assessment) of the natural product, you have to consider from the moment of extraction to the phase, let’s say, of processing and marketing and sale of the slab, and this enabled us to demonstrate our sustainability, greater sustainability, compared to other products.

Pietra Naturale Autentica has taken on a significant mission also through its endeavor with this video and on this stand to champion the sustainability of our product.

What’s important for us as a trade association, so I recall our role as the Confindustria Marmomacc trade association, is our endeavor to network our members, addressing materials, components, and technology, having created and having given the first impulse to the creation of authentic natural stone, and having involved an important number of companies that participated and continued to participate every year in the life and projects of PNA.

But we also have gathered within the membership structure all those companies that have made it possible to generate that set of technical data, and thus fulfill a new promotion of natural stone that was decisive in the creation of the LCA for Italy’s natural stone sector.

PNA’s next mission will be to assess the possibility of extending to a world-wide LCA and then repeat the work with the team of experts at the Polytechnic of Turin that collaborated with us in this first phase.

This means moving from the Italian sector to the worldwide sector, repeating the same types of analyses, addressing the materials native to other countries which, as you all know, are intensively processed, distributed by Italians and in Italy for the most important projects in the world, or switching to an Italian sector APD.

And we shall address this assessment in the coming months, always a path of sustainability, always striving to give natural stone companies technical arguments to empower them to promote themselves to their main interlocutors.

Some of the main interlocutors because, in reality, natural stone is important and available for a vast spectrum of applications. It is the purvey of architects and specification engineers, i.e. to all potential natural stone users.

Clearly, when dealing with the world of architecture and the design context, we can no longer merely promote natural stone as beautiful, durable, exclusive, natural and so on. We must also provide substantial content, as our competitors do.

We believe we have done an important job, performed important work and have given additional tools for stonework companies that can now better qualify themselves, let’s say, to the contracting entities. And PNA’s goal will always be to continue on this path, always with a view to objectively promoting natural stone in the world, regardless of its origin and irrespective of the membership or exclusivity of companies that are part of the PNA group.