---
title: "This furniture borrows from Carrara’s waste. The material trail stops early"
locale: "en"
url: "https://irz.fr/en/articles/marmifere-carrara-recycled-marble-en"
markdown_url: "https://irz.fr/en/articles/marmifere-carrara-recycled-marble-en.md"
category: "craft"
tags: ["marble", "Carrara", "reuse", "design", "materials", "urban furniture"]
published_at: "2026-08-21T08:45:00.000Z"
author: "Léa Perrin"
translation: "https://irz.fr/fr/articles/marmifere-carrara-recycled-marble-fr.md"
---

# This furniture borrows from Carrara’s waste. The material trail stops early

Marmifere borrows its forms from the ravaneti, Carrara’s quarry-waste heaps. Moving from a waste landscape to a recycled-material claim requires one more thing, however: a traceable material source.

Designboom says Studio Lievito turns **waste marble** into modular urban furniture.[1](https://www.designboom.com/readers/studio-lievito-marmifere-carrara-marble-urban-furniture/) The photographs make the claim feel plausible enough: *Marmifere* is a group of heavy stone forms that become seats, climbing surfaces and tunnels, all modelled on the quarry landscape around Carrara.

The next question is more mundane, and public information gets vague as soon as we ask it: which pieces of marble are being used, and where were they before this project? Studio Lievito clearly bases the design on the **ravaneti**, the vast heaps left by quarrying, and Designboom also calls the marble recycled.[1](https://www.designboom.com/readers/studio-lievito-marmifere-carrara-marble-urban-furniture/) Yet the Carrara museum and *Arredo Urbano* material describe Apuan stone and Carrara marble without naming a waste stream, quarry, supplier or batch.[2](https://museomarmocarrara.it/index.php?id_categoria=0&id_doc=74&id_oggetto=0&id_sezione=4758)[3](https://www.lanazione.it/massa-carrara/cronaca/viaggio-nelle-opere-di-design-498a060a) There is no basis in those pages for calling the stone virgin, but there is no material trail proving recovered stone either.

## One word too far

*Marmifere* joined Eduardo Baroni and Angelo Mammoliti among the three winners of the 2025 White Carrara urban-furniture prize, and all three projects are now on show at mudaC through September 13.[2](https://museomarmocarrara.it/index.php?id_categoria=0&id_doc=74&id_oggetto=0&id_sezione=4758)[4](https://www.antenna3.tv/2025/09/15/rigenerazione-attraverso-larredo-urbano-ecco-i-vincitori-della-prima-edizione-del-premio-internazionale-white-carrara/)

What visitors see is still project material: La Nazione says each winner is represented by a board, a video and **a physical scale model**; when the prizes were announced, Carrara's administration said it planned to work with local companies to manufacture the pieces and place them around the city.[3](https://www.lanazione.it/massa-carrara/cronaca/viaggio-nelle-opere-di-design-498a060a)[4](https://www.antenna3.tv/2025/09/15/rigenerazione-attraverso-larredo-urbano-ecco-i-vincitori-della-prima-edizione-del-premio-internazionale-white-carrara/) The full-size objects therefore remain a production step ahead, with room for the stone source and block dimensions to change.

> Illustration: Two Marmifere volumes showing stepped forms and a tunnel-like opening. The project borrows terraces, monolithic masses and tunnel forms from the Carrara quarry landscape. Its geometry is well documented; the physical source of the marble is not. Credit: [Studio Lievito / via Designboom](https://www.designboom.com/readers/studio-lievito-marmifere-carrara-marble-urban-furniture/).

Calling the stone **recycled** goes further than saying the design refers to quarry waste, because it makes a claim about where the material came from.

## Several wastes

Carrara produces plenty of waste, but the word covers very different things, as a 2024 study of the Carrara Marble Basin lists white flakes, dark flakes, defective or fractured blocks, crushed slabs and several fine fractions.[5](https://doi.org/10.3390/su16073056) For 2012–2017, waste and debris averaged **73.7% of all material extracted**; the paper gives a similar picture for 2020, when about 2.1 million tonnes of a 2.8-million-tonne total were waste and debris.[5](https://doi.org/10.3390/su16073056)

A fractured block and cutting sludge are not interchangeable raw materials: the first can still be handled as stone, whereas *marmettola* is a fine residue from cutting. The 2024 study found the sludges rich in calcium carbonate and discusses their use in paper, paint, polymers and construction materials, while CNR's STONE project worked on stone slurries, including Carrara marble, for products such as panels and for additive manufacturing.[5](https://doi.org/10.3390/su16073056)[6](https://www.ipcf.cnr.it/stone-sustainable-ecodesign-reusing-quarrying-waste/)

> **‘Marble waste’ is not one material**
> Diagram separating coarse quarry waste from fine fractions and showing that they require different reuse routes.
> - Same quarry, very different behaviour
> - COARSE WASTE
> - white / dark flakes
fractured blocks
crushed slabs
> - FINE FRACTIONS
> - excavation fines
marmettola
cutting sludge
> - Reusing a block and processing CaCO₃ powder are different jobs. ‘Waste’ hides that distinction.
> The categories come from the 2024 study of quarry waste in the Carrara Marble Basin. A reuse claim becomes more useful once it identifies which material stream is actually being reused.

“Quarry waste” is therefore only the start of a description, because for *Marmifere* we still need to know which category of stone reaches the workshop.

## The form works

The design itself is easier to follow: the first *Marmifere* module copies the eroded profile associated with the ravaneti, with one face hollowed into a reclined seat and the other carrying recycled-plastic climbing holds, while a cavity runs through the middle in reference to tunnels on the old Ferrovia Marmifera, and placing modules in a row links those openings into a crawl-through tunnel for children.[1](https://www.designboom.com/readers/studio-lievito-marmifere-carrara-marble-urban-furniture/)

A second module takes its shape from quarry terraces, where the steps provide seating at different heights while another wall and tunnel keep the climbing and crawling functions.[1](https://www.designboom.com/readers/studio-lievito-marmifere-carrara-marble-urban-furniture/)

None of this depends on a recycling claim to be interesting, since Studio Lievito has turned quarry features into things people can sit on, climb and move through rather than simply putting a marble finish on conventional street furniture; the unresolved part is whether the stone follows the same route as the visual idea.

## Size decides

Lucia Massari's 2015 *Marbleabilia* collection is a useful comparison because its scraps have addresses, so to speak.

Massari worked with Mandruzzato Marmi & Graniti using Carrara marble and onyx left from commissioned countertops, sinks and gravestones, material that Designboom reported would otherwise have been ground into gravel.[7](https://www.designboom.com/design/lucia-massari-vienna-design-week-09-28-2015/) She sent drawings and colour preferences to the workshop, which then interpreted them using suitable scraps on hand; the changing stock helped determine what each object looked like.[7](https://www.designboom.com/design/lucia-massari-vienna-design-week-09-28-2015/)

Massari’s reuse claim is easier to inspect because, if *Marmifere* is eventually cut from rejected quarry blocks, the size, cracks and quality of those blocks ought to affect selection and machining. If ordinary commercial blocks are used instead, the ravaneti remain the project's subject rather than its material source; either route can produce good design, but they describe different facts.

## Missing trail

The missing information is wonderfully boring, because a short material sheet could name the quarry or processor, state whether the stone was rejected quarry material, a workshop offcut or a commercial block, and record roughly how much of the starting block survives machining. The same sheet could also say whether the full-size street pieces will use the competition proposal's material specification.

For now, the public sources do not provide those details, which tells us nothing about Studio Lievito's eventual choice of stone. The project is still being shown through drawings, video and a scale model, and Carrara's administration has said that manufacture with local companies is a later step.[3](https://www.lanazione.it/massa-carrara/cronaca/viaggio-nelle-opere-di-design-498a060a)[4](https://www.antenna3.tv/2025/09/15/rigenerazione-attraverso-larredo-urbano-ecco-i-vincitori-della-prima-edizione-del-premio-internazionale-white-carrara/) That leaves time for the material record to become part of the finished work, and if the final modules really are cut from the waste heaps they depict, that fact should be as easy to find as the reason for the tunnel or the climbing holds. Carrara has no shortage of marble waste; the interesting question is which piece made it into the object.

## References

1. [Designboom, Studio Lievito turns waste marble into modular, urban micro-architectural furniture, August 19 2026](https://www.designboom.com/readers/studio-lievito-marmifere-carrara-marble-urban-furniture/)
2. [mudaC Carrara, Arredo Urbano, July 12 – September 13 2026](https://museomarmocarrara.it/index.php?id_categoria=0&id_doc=74&id_oggetto=0&id_sezione=4758)
3. [La Nazione, Viaggio nelle opere di design vincitrici di White al Mudac, July 7 2026](https://www.lanazione.it/massa-carrara/cronaca/viaggio-nelle-opere-di-design-498a060a)
4. [Antenna 3, Winners of the White Carrara International Prize, September 15 2025](https://www.antenna3.tv/2025/09/15/rigenerazione-attraverso-larredo-urbano-ecco-i-vincitori-della-prima-edizione-del-premio-internazionale-white-carrara/)
5. [Tazzini et al., Managing Marble Quarry Waste, Sustainability 16(7), 2024](https://doi.org/10.3390/su16073056)
6. [CNR-IPCF, STONE — SusTainable ecOdesign reusiNg quarrying wastE](https://www.ipcf.cnr.it/stone-sustainable-ecodesign-reusing-quarrying-waste/)
7. [Designboom, Lucia Massari — marble off-cuts define a unique furniture collection, September 28 2015](https://www.designboom.com/design/lucia-massari-vienna-design-week-09-28-2015/)