By recycling wood, Saviola saves a forest the size of Rome every year

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What does it mean to save 10 thousand trees from being felled every day? It means that, in a calendar year, over 2.8 million plants will remain standing, equal to the surface area of ​​the Municipality of Rome. Impressive numbers, for non-experts. But numbers that are daily bread for a company like the Saviola Group, specialized in the production of furniture panels made by recycling wood recovered from old furniture, pallets, fruit crates…

Wood which, otherwise, would have to be thrown away, with economic and environmental costs linked to disposal, not to mention the apparently intangible cost – but in fact more tangible than ever – of 2.8 million trees a day which would have to be cut down to obtain the raw material .

In an Italian context which sees the national panel industry holding the European record in the circular economy, the Mantuan company (founded by Mauro Saviola in 1963) was among the pioneers in the recycling of wood for the production of panels, and therefore mobile, sustainable. Today the group – which in addition to the production of panels also includes four other business divisions – manages to recycle 1.5 million tonnes of end-of-life wood every year, equal to 30 times the size of the Colosseum, avoiding, as mentioned, the daily felling of 10 thousand trees.

Saviola at the Milan Triennale

But Saviola’s ecological panels do not only find application in the furniture industry: the group presented at the Milan Triennale three installations created using regenerated wood panels, obtained from a circular economy process that involves collection, cleaning, separation from other materials (iron, plastic, aluminium, brass and copper), which in turn are separately recycled, allowing post-consumer wood to acquire new life. The first is Cuore – Centro Studi, Archivi, Ricerca, the new space at Triennale Milano dedicated to research, memory and innovation. Designed by Luca Cipelletti, it is located on the ground floor of the Palazzo dell’Arte and conceived as a flexible and constantly evolving place, Cuore was created to bring out the design and research work that is the basis of all the Triennale’s activities.

The second installation presented by Saviola is the installation project by Studio Italo Rota for the exhibition Italian Painting today, curated by Damiano Gullì, curator of contemporary art and public programs at the Triennale. The production of the materials used in the exhibition requires a quantitative reduction of the original material in its production phase. The exhibition is thus directed towards 100% non-production of CO2 and non-use of finishing materials, glues, paints, stuccos, welding.