Sustainablity: Stone’s Repeat Business

There’s

plenty of material that can be reclaimed and repurposed – and there are people doing just that, with everything from slate and marble to limestone and granite.

Recycled stone isn’t necessarily going to save end users a lot of money. However, it can offer material that’s no longer being quarried, or intricately worked by craftsmen from a different age.

And, it also can provide a bit of a back story that, along with a rich patina, gives the material that extra panache.

UNIQUE SOURCES

Roofs and bathrooms may not seem like primary sources of natural stone, but it’s certainly possible, especially if the roofs are slate and the bathrooms are marble.

Staci Straubmueller, formerly of Carrollton, Texas-based Floor Tile and Slate Co., says what that company calls “historical slate,” isn’t a large part of the operation, but a popular one.

“We’re a stone-flooring business, and we also deal with clay tile,” she explains. “Most of what we sell is slate and travertine and marble.”

The historical slate comes from roofing that’s been removed from churches, houses and even barns. While much of it is recycled back onto other roofs, other pieces fall closer to the ground.

“What they can’t use for roofing is cut into flooring,” she explains. “I’ve personally used it for everything from flooring to wall cladding and backsplashes to countertops. And, I’ve also made crosses and coasters and candlesticks with it.”

Originally quarried in Vermont, the slate – after years of direct exposure to the sun – has a tendency to fade and turn color, Straubmueller says.

“The interesting thing is, if it’s been where it’s real cold, it will turn one color, but if it’s where it’s not as cold, it will turn something else,” she says. “That’s what’s so beautiful about them. Every piece is completely different, and a lot of times you’ll see spots of tar or paint or the overhang from the next piece.”

Not only is each tile unique in appearance; typically, there’s no standard tile size. Installers need to improvise to fit the pieces together, using an acrylic latex additive in a thin-set mortar.

Unlike some heavier stones, Straubmueller says the slate can be shipped easily nationwide. Today, many people find her company on the Internet, although it’s been featured in magazine articles on homes incorporating historical slate.

“If people don’t want Indian or African slates, and they’re looking for something unique and different, this is it,” she says.

Straubmueller gets leads on old slate from the Vermont quarrier who supplies her new stone and she has a tile specialist combing the country for old slate that’s being removed. However, for Milwaukee Marble and Granite, people often contact the firm directly offering reclaimed marble.

“As older public buildings get demolished or renovated, we try to latch onto the material,” says John Schmidt, lead estimator for Milwaukee Marble’s commercial division. “Sometimes, they had bathroom walls 6’ high that were all stone, and the stalls and partitions were made of marble”

A recent case in point: work being done to the Milwaukee County courthouse in the namesake Wisconsin metropolis.

“They were doing a remodel and I got a call that they had some marble they weren’t going to use,” Schmidt says. “They asked us to salvage that.”

The most common stones the firm salvages are some of the older Tennessee gray marbles, although when Milwaukee Marble was helping restore the Chicago Board of Trade building about four years ago, it was able to find a match for an Italian-quarried stone.

The most-common use for the stone, Schmidt adds, is to put it in other – also older – bathrooms being retrofitted to become compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

“We don’t go out and look for this stone, but when it’s available, we usually take it,” he says. “If you don’t have a use for it, it’s going to take up space, but we get called in quite a lot to remodel bathrooms, so that’s where we’re at with the grays in particular.”

ORGANIC EXPERIENCE

Bob Beaty, founding partner of Philadelphia-based Provenance, picks up salvagable marble off the ground – literally.

Provenance features all types of salvage, and included in the company’s offerings are marble doorsteps, as well as marble slabs pulled from Philadelphia’s Independence Mall.

Beaty began his career operating a California landfill before returning to his Philly hometown; today, his goal is to keep as much of the area’s history as possible from being buried.

“I think people appreciate the character of a lot of the older building materials,” he says. “Not only can these materials be reclaimed, but people want a story; they want to know where the material came from. Even with the economy the way it is, there’s a growing demand.”

Philadelphia offers great opportunities for reclaiming outstanding architectural features, he adds. Not only did the city serve as one of the nation’s first capitals; for most of its history, it was also a hub of finance and commerce, and the heart of a key industrial area.

“For instance, we had a project on the Main Line, a mansion built in the 1890s,” Beaty says. “We took a sandstone fireplace out that had more than 3,000 pieces of stone. We took many photos and numbered every piece as we took it apart.”

Beaty says his customers are a wide range of people, from architects and interior designers to regular homeowners.

“There are the people who want something different, something chic,” he observes. “There are also the people who like the idea of reclaimed material.”

Again, thanks to the Internet, more people know what he has to offer, although shipping weights do create some limitations.

“We supplied an order for a thousand tons of Belgian block to a customer in Michigan,” he says. “He could probably have bought newer material right there for a third of the price, but he wanted worn cobblestones and they just aren’t in the Midwest.”

Beaty sources his material in a number of ways. One is through demolition contractors; many are pleasantly surprised when, instead of paying a disposal fee, they make money on material they remove from a job.

“We have a couple project managers who work with the demolition contractors to give them ideas on how to take something apart,” he explains.

One person Beaty has worked with, as both a buyer and a seller of stone, is Bob Nonemaker, owner of OuterSpaces Inc. and Philadelphia Stone LLC, both based in Glen Mills, Pa.

“We bought and used a bunch of the old marble from Independence Mall,” Nonemaker says. “We used that for a swimming pool surround in a home that was supposed to look like an English estate. We had these beautiful pieces of old marble that would have cost a fortune to get today. It’s 2” thick, and we paid about $10 a ft² for it.”

He’s also a fan of old street and curbing materials, including Beaty’s Belgian blocks and the granite curbs that were a long-time Philly tradition. He estimates he’s incorporated about 1,000 linear feet of the curbing into his own property as stairs and the floor of an amphitheater.

More recently, he’s purchased a church.

“I don’t have a client who’s going to buy it,” he says. “Instead, I think I’ll have multiple clients who want a piece of it. I’ve got some 35’ arches and a bell tower and spire caps, wall capping, a bunch of Gothic doorways and some other neat pieces – all in Indiana limestone.”

Nonemaker says he also expects to display some of them in his showroom, and he believes it’s a crime to simply destroy buildings that have held such important places in people’s lives.

“When we buy pieces of city streets, there’s a good chance that Ben Franklin and some of the other Founding Fathers walked on them,” he says. “That marble from the Independence Mall might have been the spot where President Kennedy stood and gave a speech.”

While many of his clients like the stories behind their material, he says the real draw for many is simply that it’s genuinely old, something he often tries to mimic in his landscape business with today’s materials.

“Probably a third of my jobs incorporate salvaged materials,” Nonemaker says. “I’d do it on every one if I could, but some of our projects are contemporary and with others it doesn’t lend itself to the job, or it just doesn’t work.”

And, he says, as a designer, working with these reclaimed materials is something of an organic experience. He adds that many of his design colleagues aren’t experienced enough with the material to incorporate it into their own designs.

“You really can’t do a set of blueprints in many cases for incorporating this stuff into a project,” he says. “It’s very hands-on, and you have to have people who work with this on a regular basis. A lot of times I’ll draw a picture and say, ‘This is what it’s going to look like.’”

SOMETHING FOR EVERYONE

Certainly, at least at this point, using recycled stone for landscaping purposes is definitely its most-popular use, and not just in the Philadelphia area, either, although it’s strong there because of the availability of materials.

“We do have a lot of stone buildings in our area,” says Ken Muth, owner of Wood Natural Restoration in Orefield, Pa. “For instance, years ago, the Amish and Mennonites were tearing down old buildings and didn’t want anything to do with the old stone, so I’d get it for free. Now, they’re selling it.”

As the company’s name suggests, Muth offers more than just recycled stone, and he estimates probably 70 percent of what he offers comes from old barns.

“We get a little of everything: limestone, sandstone and quartzite,” he adds.

Because he doesn’t palletize his materials, Muth says landscape contractors aren’t necessarily as enthusiastic about what he’s selling as homeowners who are looking for something that’s both old and unique.

“People will come to our stoneyard, pick out their stones and load them,” he says. “Sometimes it’s 50 tons they’ll load by hand off the piles, but it’s also not uncommon for me to get $25-$300 for one nice stone. They’ll come looking for a particular cut piece. Sometimes it’s ornamental, and sometimes they use it in the building.”

A little further to the west, Jason Reinhold of Cincinnati-based Land and Stones Co. says that, like OuterSpaces’ Nonemaker, one of his biggest concerns is that designers – and especially general contractors – don’t know what to do with the old stone.

“As a mason, you have to go through the general contractor, and they’re so price-conscious they’re going to get three and four bids,” he says. “They’re always going with the low bid because they don’t care what it looks like.”

He says it was probably luck on both sides that led him to a recent job he completed, installing landscaping and a driveway for a home that was built in 1881.

“We were able to match the historic stone so you can’t tell what’s new,” Reinhold says. “Every stone was hand-cut, and we were able to lay 100 tons of it from buildings we salvaged within two miles of this mansion. We finished it off with some Portsmith sandstone for the copings and brought some cobblestones in from New England for the aprons and edgings.”

More recently, he’s been working up numbers on the cost of salvaging a local church built in the 1880s from Cincinnati fieldstone. However, he says it can be difficult if you don’t have a client (and a job already lined up) because of the cost of disassembling and storing the building.

“You really have to have at least a website where you can offer the surrounds and lintels and you can steer people toward the carved pieces,” Reinhold says. “They can save the expense of having something new carved, and it does take on a nice patina.”

MATERIAL WITH VALUE

Tom Bergin of Historic Stone Co., in St. Paul, Minn., reports much the same. His company reclaims everything from schools and churches to brick and cobblestone streets.

“A lot of it is going into gardens and landscapes,” he says. “People like being outside and they’re putting more into their outdoor environments, upgrading their yards and creating living spaces that are nicer than what people did a few years ago.”

However, another popular market he’s found involves the repair of older homes.

“Maybe your building has shifted and broken a lintel or a front step,” he says. “If you need old stone – and especially if it’s an old stone and the quarry’s closed — you can still do a perfect match.”

However, he says the stone doesn’t even have to be really old. He’s seeing buildings that were built in the 1960s and ‘70s now being torn down.

“A lot of them have really neat granite,” Bergin says. “We just did a university project where they had a granite foundation and a lot of benches. There’s a lot of neat stone from that period; it just looks different.”

Perhaps the best indication that Bergin and his partner in Historic Stone are on to something is the growth of the company itself.

The two men both have other careers and originally began reclaiming stone for fun. Now the company has five full-time employees and Bergin is looking at adding a different type of reclaimed material.

“I’m looking at an amethyst quarry where they mine amethyst crystals,” he says. “They have by-products with veining and some amethyst in it, so it’s a unique stone. We’re looking at bringing in a truckload of this stone and adding some new color to the market.

“It’s using waste material from quarries that still has value.”

That’s nothing new to Mike Harrington of Stoneyard Building Materials in Santa Barbara, Calif. Among the firm’s offerings is Santa Barbara sandstone that’s either been reclaimed from old buildings, or fabricated new from excavation sites in the area.

Harrington says the company has grown about 15 percent in the past year, with more than half of that growth from Santa Barbara sandstone, which the company cuts, snap cuts and tumbles.

“We’re really close to zero waste right now; we’re processing every little bit of it,” he says. “We’re making street cobbles out of it, and we’ve promoted the smaller materials for drainage ditch projects, culvert liner and as rock mulch.”

Although Harrington admits that not every community has a stone that endemic to it, those that do – whether it’s sandstone, limestone or basalt – offer plenty of opportunities for people willing to work with excavators cutting roadways or building foundations, and even people just looking to clean up their property.

“We’ll even take fieldstones that might otherwise be crushed onsite or thrown away,” he says. “It’s more economical for us to preserve the material and make it salable because it’s so heavy it becomes a liability at dumpsites.”

At least in California, he says people are enthusiastic about buying the local stone and incorporating it into the landscape.

“We take it, process it, and sell it as split-face wall rock or boulders or cobbles,” Harrington concludes. “It just needs someone to make it into a salable product, and it’s a lot nicer than concrete.”

© 2010 Western Business Media

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