Whoever chose EPDItaly tells its story: Stabila Group

Interview with Michele Destro, R&D and marketing manager – Stabila Group

You are the first Italian manufacturer of brick blocks to have undertaken the EPDItaly certification. What are the main reasons that led you in this direction?
Simply one, our DNA … always characterized by quality, innovation and strenuous attention to the environment. Quality attested, for almost three decades, in Category I by the most rigorous and rigorous certification system 2+. Innovation (and research), which in recent years has produced materials and solutions that are now unique in the construction market. And last but not least the protection of the environment, which the company has considered, in unsuspected times, a primary objective. This is confirmed by our certifications Uni En Iso 14001 – Environmental Management System – and Uni En Iso 14021 on the content and proper use of recycled materials. This is the premise that led us to take the EPD path.

What are the advantages for a company of an EPD certification and the related Life Cycle Assessment?
First of all, of course, the absolute transparency of the values, real and not estimated, on the actual environmental impact that the certification allows to transmit to the actors of the chain (designers and clients) and in secundis, the achievement of a more detailed monitoring of the individual production phases, for greater process optimization.
The Stabila Group, with extreme stubbornness and conviction, has completed an uneasy process, given also the absence of the most banal benchmark, which has allowed us to translate very well in numbers the work carried out in these years on sustainability
of process functional to the reduction of the environmental impact. Continuous and punctual have been the investments on research and innovation that have allowed, maintaining the quality unaltered, a decisive reduction of the waste materials through an increase in the recovery and reuse of waste, reducing the consumption of raw materials and, at the same time, energy sources. The EPD certification has therefore proved to be an excellent analysis tool able to quantify and enhance our commitment.

In your opinion, how important is the presence of sustainable products made in Italy within a Program Operator that makes the international network one of its strengths?
Environmental sustainability, circular economy, conscious productions are the new missions related not to simple slogans but to a reality that requires immediate answers. To think, then, that what happens thousands of miles from us can not interfere with the environment that surrounds us is the most wrong and misleading.
So a Program Operator, which counts among its main objectives the “doing” international network, is conditio sine qua non for not only sharing experiences and solutions, but becoming the true transfer of culture on the correct actions to be implemented for sustainability.