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Who owns the leftover stone from your slab?
In short. A bespoke top is cut from a whole slab, and a whole slab is what you pay for. What is left around the piece is not waste: it is material you have bought, and the only stone that matches your top. Here is how much is left, who owns it by default, and how to reserve it.
Why do you pay for the whole slab and not for the piece installed?
Because natural stone is sold by the slab. You do not order a square metre and a half of marble the way you order a metre and a half of fabric: you buy a slab, with its dimensions, its number and its pattern, and the piece is cut from it. The price on the quotation may be expressed per square metre, but the material committed is the whole slab.
This is where nearly every misunderstanding starts. A top of a metre and a half square, cut from a slab of five square metres, consumes five square metres from the maker’s point of view: that slab was selected, reserved and cut for that piece, and does not return to stock in the form it had. The buyer pays for a piece; the seller commits a slab. The difference sits inside the price, and it is why a small top does not cost proportionally less than a large one, as we set out in how much a custom marble table costs.
How much material is really left?
More than most people expect.
Before any cut, a sawn slab has to be squared: the edges arrive irregular from the gangsaw, and five to ten centimetres per side disappear between gross and net. A slab sold as 300 × 180 centimetres yields a clean rectangle of roughly 290 × 170.
Then there is the offcut proper. In stone workshops it is measured as yield: how much of the slab ends up in the delivered piece. A yield regarded as normal sits around 72 per cent, a good one, achieved by nesting the pieces carefully on the drawing, reaches towards 82. Put the other way round: between a fifth and a third of the slab stays outside the piece, and industry estimates put leftover material at 20 to 35 per cent on an ordinary job.
On a table the proportion can be worse. An oval top leaves unusable crescents around it, and a centred vein means the piece cannot move to wherever the cutting would prefer: where the pattern falls decides where the offcut falls.
How much stone does it take, counting from the quarry?
Widen the view as far as the mountain and the numbers change scale. A 2024 study of the Carrara basin counts that about 51 per cent of the extracted material stays at the quarry as waste, and that a further 41 per cent of the regular blocks becomes waste at the processing plant, when the block is sawn into slabs. The total is around 71 per cent: only 29 per cent of what is extracted becomes a finished product.
This is not a figure to be read as guilt. It makes one point: an offcut is the most valuable part of the chain, because it has already been extracted, sawn and polished. Forgetting it in a warehouse is the only one of the three wastes that a single line written at the right moment can prevent.
Who owns the offcut?
Almost always the fabricator, and almost always because nobody said otherwise.
In current practice the fabrication agreement leaves unused material with the workshop: the offcut goes into the remnant stock, where it will be resold — typically at 40 to 60 per cent below the price of a full slab — or used on another job. It is worth saying plainly, because the misunderstanding is widespread: buying “by the slab” does not automatically transfer ownership of the leftover. The material is reserved for your project, not delivered to your address.
There is nothing improper in this, and it is one of the reasons prices sit where they do: the residual value of the offcuts is already inside the quotation. But it can be agreed differently, on one condition — saying so beforehand.
Why reserve it even if you do not yet know what for?
For a reason that has nothing to do with saving money.
The offcut from your slab is the only stone that matches your top. Two slabs of the same marble, under the same trade name, do not share a pattern: it changes from block to block and from slab to slab within the same block. If in two years you need a shelf, a vanity top or the replacement of a damaged piece, the only material that will not jar is the one sitting in the workshop today.
The same holds for the pleasant case: if the pattern is to carry on from one piece to the next, you need consecutive slabs from the same block, as we set out in how long a marble top can be in one piece. All of it is decided when the slab is chosen, not when it is installed.
There is also a prosaic aspect: remnant yards empty out. An offcut sits in stock for three months to a year, then it is sold or cut down. A request made with the order costs one line; the same request two years later is a hope.
How is it written into the order?
In three lines, before the signature rather than after the delivery.
The first states who keeps the unused material, naming the slab number. The second states what happens to it: delivered with the piece, or set aside under that number, and for how long. The third states who carries the storage and the transport, because an offcut two metres by sixty centimetres weighs more than a hundred kilos.
If the stone is not wanted, one thing is still worth asking and costs nothing: a photograph of the offcut with its number. Months later that is what tells you whether anything still exists from which the missing piece could be cut, instead of starting again from the trade name, which identifies a category and not an object.
How we work
We buy blocks at the quarry and saw the slabs in our own plant, and every slab is read against the light before cutting: it is how we decide where the piece falls and where the offcut falls. Having the block means having the consecutive slabs, which is why a pattern carrying from one piece to the next is something we can decide on rather than hope for. On a bespoke piece a quotation follows within forty-eight hours.
Tables are in the collections; hotel and project work is on the Contract page. Start from our contact page, with the dimensions and, if there is one, a drawing even in outline.
Frequently asked questions
If I do not use the whole slab, is the remaining part discounted?
No, and the reason is the first one on this page: the slab is committed in full. What can be obtained, by asking in advance, is the leftover material — not a reduction in the price.
Can I take the offcuts away on installation day?
Only if it was agreed and they were set aside. An offcut that was not reserved is, by that day, usually already in the remnant stock.
Is it worth buying an extra slab to have spare material?
It depends how much matching matters. On a stone with a uniform ground, almost never; on a strongly patterned stone, where a replacement would show, it is a precaution worth weighing when the slab is chosen.
What can be made from an offcut?
From a long narrow strip, windowsills, shelves, plinths, vanity tops; from a compact one, the top of a side table. Not a second long top, because length is the first thing consumed. Nor is it worth stiffening a thin offcut with resin: structure is solved by support, as we set out in how thick a marble top should be. Always keep one sample, cut and labelled.
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The figures and percentages on this page are orders of magnitude and should be read as such: the yield of a slab depends on the shape of the piece, the veining to be respected and the material itself. The Carrara basin waste percentages are taken from a study published in Sustainability in 2024; the figures on yield, leftover material and remnant pricing from technical trade publications. None of this replaces the written terms of an individual order.