How to turn the Camp Nou skeleton into a nightstand

Santa Fe del PenedèsIn a vacant lot in Santa Fe del Penedès, between lonely vineyards and the C-15 motorway, some pieces of the new Camp Nou are waiting patiently to begin a second life. Being part of of one of the most important works currently being built in southern Europe to an uncertain future that could lead them to become either a stately door to a block of flats in the Eixample district or the nightstand you'll buy next week at Ikea.

The ground is slightly muddy because this week the rain has become another companion in the Penedès, which is in the midst of grape harvest, but the eye is more interested in what's up above than in the state of the ground. Tons of wood are stacked on top of each other to form mountains about 100 meters long and five meters high. The most famous pieces of wood are also the ones that stand out the most due to the chromatic contrast, thanks to their dark, almost black color. They measure one and a half meters high by one meter wide. They are waiting to begin a second life after the first one is finished: serving as formwork during the remodeling of the Camp Nou.

"This wood is of very high quality. It's awful having to grind it up. When you see such high-quality material being used, you understand why projects of the magnitude of the Camp Nou project have such a high cost," Sergi Montané, head of Mongira, a company dedicated to recycling rubble and wood, explained to ARA. The Camp Nou formwork began arriving in March of this year, and he had to reject half of it because the quantity offered to him was so huge that if he had accepted it all, he would have to stop serving his regular customers.

Truck queues

"Having material as large as the Camp Nou construction project arrives may only happen once in a lifetime, and we can't forget our long-standing customers. During the spring, there were days when there," he says, pointing to the rural road that leads to the company, "there were lines of trucks." The buildup was due to the fact that, at first, the trucks didn't arrive directly from Camp Nou, but from another vacant lot on the outskirts of Barcelona where wood extracted from the stadium had been accumulating for months. Now, some trucks arrive directly from Camp Nou, but much less frequently than in previous months.

Mongira's main activity arose from the construction crisis. The origins of this family business were specialized in excavations for construction sites, but when the construction boom hit in 2007, it had to reinvent itself to survive. They started with rubble recycling and expanded their catalog to include pallets and pruning. Until they arrived at Camp Nou.

Two companies divide the work

Just like the rubble of Camp Nou They are being recycled just a few meters from the stadium, on the site left by the demolition of the Miniestadi, and used to generate material for the remodeling of the Barça stadium itself, the wood extracted will be recycled for other uses and has been distributed between this company in Santa Fe del Penedès and another near the Port of Barcelona. In Mongira, the company is responsible for grinding it into sawdust—like the kind used in the Nativity scene, but on a larger scale—a gigantic blue machine with a 515-horsepower engine bought in Germany that is frightening and works with the same discipline as Hansi Flick.

Magnificent pieces of wood, like those used for the Camp Nou formwork, are shredded in a matter of seconds by a rotor with frantic hammers. Despite the strident noise, watching the process has a relaxing quality, worthy of becoming an ASMR YouTube video. But the Mongira manager pulls us out of this abstraction by asking us to step back to avoid being hit by any of the wood fragments the machine spits out at dizzying speed. Once this process is complete, the final product is sent to other companies that further refine the wood and turn it into boards that will be supplied, for example, to IKEA.