Check the Footprint, and the Foot
The online crowd, for exampe, can’t mention concrete countertops without chiming in about using fly ash (residue from coal combustion) as the wise green alternative to Portland cement. And, it’s a great idea, as long as you want concrete showing those dull flat grays of Brezhnev-era slapdash Soviet apartment blocks.
Go to the Concrete Countertop Institute, for example, and you’ll find other alternatives (such as metakaolin) to pare down the use of Portland cement and still offer better color maintenance. Finding this out might taken 10 minutes or so on the Web, but it’s a lot easier to use the green chic term of something like, well, fly ash.
There’s also plenty of life for stone in downcycling, or the continuing use of materials after the original job is done. Granite can be crushed to varying degrees for fill, outdoor decorative aggregate or tinting of mixed materials like concrete, or cut for custom tiles and pavers. That’s a larger afterlife than most green countertop materials – but the online consensus is that you either can have old tops cut for small end-table surfaces or just chucked in the dumpster.
Stone isn’t the perfect material in the sustainable market, although it’s gotten a bad rap from too many people who’d look very unhip if they didn’t take cheap potshots … and then froth over products and materials with unproven track records or not much more green credibility.
And the real losers? Try the consumers who find this stuff on the ‘Net and think they’re reading thought-out, in-depth advice. Poor folks. And, in the end, poor us, too.
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