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MaDe Participant
Name

Laura Freixas Conde

Material
Cardboard Marble
Nationality
Spanish
Classification
Vegetable
Workshop
Barcelona
Category
Industry
Profile

I’m Laura Freixas and I have studied a double degree in Industrial Design Engineering and Product Design at Elisava. I am very interested in emerging materials, circular economy and design. For this reason my final degree project 0-knit deals with biofabrication and zero waste. I have worked with Materfad’s library and Elisava Research in the organization of the exhibition “Future Woods. Earth & Mars”, and I’m currently working on Puig Ideation FabLab.

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Project Information
Material Qualities
Yellow / Orange / Brown / Black, Hard and fragile, Shiny, A bit of pine resin, Smooth
Material Recipe
100g colophony (pine resin) 50g cardboard pulp 30ml water
Material Application
The process used to make Cardboard Marble is similar to polymeric resin industries. Cardboard Marble could be applied in interiors such as tiles, panels, lights and furniture. It could also be applied to jewelry complements and perfumery such as caps or packaging elements.
Material Method
1 - Moisten and crush the cardboard / It's necessary to use a grinder. 2 - Heat the pine resin until it melts / It's necessary to use a stove and a pan. 3 - Pour a part of the resin into a mold. 4 - Add pieces of cardboard pulp in the mold. 5 - Cover the cardboard with the other part of the resin. 6 - Let the resin solidify and remove it from the mold when it is cold.
Material Narrative
I have been doing and internship at Puig, a familiar fashion and fragrance company based in Barcelona. After assessing different options of waste I have opted for the cardboard because it is one of the waste that is generated with more quantity annually in the factory, around 350.000kg. It is a daily waste available to everyone and very frequent in all industries. Colophony is a solid form of resin obtained from coniferous trees such as pine. It is a semi- transparent and varies in color from yellow to black. Cardboard Marble is the union between two products of the pine. The fibers of the cardboard are obtained from the tree and the pine resin forms the colophony.
Cardboard can be recycled around six times and then the fibers are too small to be used again. At this point the cardboard pulp would be used to make Cardboard Marble. Once the Cardboard Marble had finished its life cycle the product could be melted and filtered to separate the two elements and reuse the colophony.
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MaDe, a project co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of The European Union, aims at boosting talents towards circular economies across Europe partnering with design and cultural institutions, Elisava, Ma-tt-er and Politecnico di Milano.

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