No stone is lost, all stone is transformed

Nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed. Ever heard this quote? You probably have. What you probably don’t know is that the same can also be said about MVC - Portuguese Limestone’s production line. 

As we have been blogging about for the last couple of weeks, MVC is picking up the slack when it comes to environmental conservation. We are committed to restoring the quarries’ ecology back to the previous condition as much as humanly possible and we recycle pretty much all the water we use (and it’s quite a lot of H2O).

It is only natural that our green policies go beyond that. 

Stone extraction and cutting can be quite a wasteful line of business if you’re not conscious enough. Either because of poor usage of the total slab size to cut pieces or the cutting inefficiency altogether. However, we at MVC - Portuguese Limestones are always looking for solutions to reduce the stone waste in the factory and be more environmentally efficient. Besides having top of the line fine-tuned machinery, we have teamed up with other organizations and the academia in several projects aiming to reuse stone residue.

One of those projects is digitalSTONE. MVC is the lead promoter of a pilot experiment to use stone residue in 3D printing. We are working with Instituto Superior Técnico, CDRSP-IPL, HRV and Takenet.

MVC is also working with Universidade de Coimbra, CTCV and MCS Portugal to research new applications for stone residue, mainly on ceramics and urban furniture on a project called Life4Stone.

Stone and paper don’t always go together. But in the PAPEPO project, we have teamed up with Instituto Politécnico de Leiria, Instituto Politécnico de Portalegre and New Next Moves to the development of paper substitute material made from limestone waste.

As a responsible and eco-conscious stone supplier we take pride in the strides we have made to protect our environment and work hard to give back to nature.