Pedra Pádua Brasil

October 6, 2003

   Most of the population utilizes bicycles to cross the narrow and friendly bridges, and downtown seems always busy and colorful. I visited Santo Antonio de Pádua during its winter – July – and the temperature was around 70°F. During the summer the temperature can reach the upper 90s and Pádua begins its outdoor lifestyle, with bars and restaurants ventilated by the breeze of the Pomba.
   Beginning in Pádua, and cutting inside of the northeastern region of the state of Rio de Janeiro, a set of two mountains run parallel at approximately 80 kilometers in length. Pedra Pádua, a dark-gray fine-grained milonitic rock, with white dots (feldspar), is found only there, at one side of the mountain. At the opposite side is the source for Pedra Madeira, a gneiss composed of milonitic rock, in hues of yellow (the most-accepted commercially), white, green and pink. They are decorative stones, with a rough and rugged texture, to be used for paving stones, front walls, gardens and other architectural landscaping.
Stone has been always an important economic resource for the region; however, until recently, the extraction and marketing of Pádua stone was done by local owners with no structure to explore the reserves appropriately. Although Santo Antonio de Pádua is pleasant and economically active, the area is considered one of the poorest in the state by the United Nations in terms of human development (which, among other items includes health conditions, life expectancy and educational levels).
   For many years, Pádua stone quarrying involved only the workers and hammers, shovels and chisels. At the beginning of the 1970s – even without the legal right of mineral production or an estimate of the quarries – extraction of the gray rock was intensified by local quarriers in the county of Miracema, 30 kilometers from Pádua. (It’s also why this rock is known in Brazil as Miracema Stone.)
After a decade of extraction in areas of easy access, however, the same group of local quarriers had to mobilize themselves to initiate a more-mechanized process with tractors, trucks and forklifts, to attend a more sophisticated and growing internal market.
   In the beginning of the 1980s, Santo Antonio de Pádua really turned its attention to its natural mineral wealth by intensifying the extraction of minerals from its beautiful and huge deposits. The mining of stones has since become a major economic activity in the region, with approximately 100 quarries and 300 stonemasons and cutters; the industry now generates a total of 6,000 jobs and makes a notable improvement in the population’s quality of life

STONE CLUSTER
   With the support of SEBRAE of Rio de Janeiro, an agency subsidized by the Ministry of Science and Technology to improve and to help small and medium companies grow, the local owners of Pádua stone began creating something without precedent in the sector. A cluster of 22 companies – Pedra Pádua Brasil – was founded to develop and to improve their ways of production and marketing. The challenge was how to set up a plan to transform a precarious system into a more-advanced one with adequate techniques of extraction and fabrication to attend to domestic- and international-market needs..
   The plan of action and development optimized resources and reduced expenses. Principles based on cooperatives and associations were concepts not easily accepted by the community, affirms Rodrigo Brantes, the director of the project and SEBRAE economist.
   “We had at least eight meetings of eight hours each, with support of a mediator and a consultant of international markets, to help us to establish our plan”.
   The project, in development since March 2002, already shows impressive results. Among many actions cited in the plan, one of the most-important is the creation of a common industrial park to fabricate the stone.
   The group also developed two machines. One of them, called the serra-point created by one resident of Pádua, improves the cutting of blocks; the other improves the cutting of smaller blocks.
   Other immediate measures to improve quality of production included the enhancement of blasting techniques and introduction of flame jets. A quarry school was also created to develop a better work force.
   Most of the fabrication shops – in many cases, situated by the quarries – had a very simple, yet organized, workflow. First, diamond-disc cutting machines square the stone up from 50cm X 50cm X 8cm (19.6” X 19.6” X 3.1”) to 47cm X 47cm X 4cm (18.5” X 18.5” X 1.5”); a second cut is made to 23cm X 11.5cm X 4cm (9” X 4.5” X 1.5”) to produce smaller blocks, or bloquinho.
   From that size, all work is done by hand, with hammers, chisels and extremely skilled workmanship. A typical fabrication shop holds anywhere from 20-50 people, and every piece of stone is used, down to tumbled stone for landscaping and crushed stone for construction.
   The monthly production of the Pádua quarries is 5,000 tons, which represents 400,000 m² (43 million ft²) of decorative stone.
   The group publishes a very fine trilingual brochure about the product, participates in international trade shows, operates an office in the city of Santo Antonio de Pádua, and – to date – shipped 13 containers to Spain and a full container of samples to the United States.
   During my visit to a few of the quarries, I was able to observe a serious attitude regarding environmental issues, with adequate water-recycling systems used during fabrication, and worker safety – although it frightened me many times to watch two men working together, with one holding a chisel over a big block and the other striking it with an enormous and heavy hammer.
   Pedra Pádua Brasil is an intelligent project helping to reshape the economy of the region, and giving inspiration to many other sectors to do the same.