Sustainability: Setting the Standard in Stone
“We don’t do that,” he says. “We want the people to show up and hear what we’re doing and educate them about what we do.”
While the general public is likely to be weighing the benefits of stone for kitchen countertops and bathroom vanities, designers and architects – the people in position to specify stone for larger projects – may also be laboring under some of the same misperceptions, at least according to some quarriers.
Click photo to enlarge“Our original research talked specifically with architects and designers and they don’t have a good perception of what quarrying practices really are,” says John Mattke, president of Cold Spring, Minn.-based Cold Spring Granite Co. and former chairman of the NSC’s sustainability committee.
Additionally, Mattke says many are being pressured by their clients to design buildings that earn LEED points.
“The LEED system isn’t very favorable for stone right now,” Mattke observes. “They’re being driven by that, rather than what their heart tells them and what they know innately about stone as a sustainable material.”
It’s a rare stone supplier who doesn’t know that a LEED® credit is available for sourcing stone as close to a given project as possible – which is good news for some U.S. quarriers.
“Really, with LEED, one of the few ways to get points is if the stone is quarried within a 500-mile radius of the project,” says Brenda Edwards, president of Garden City, Texas-based Texastone Quarries. “Obviously, a lot of Texas projects are using our stone because it gets them LEED points, but otherwise, the contractors don’t seem to know to talk to us about being green.”
Edwards, who’s the NSC chair this year, adds that the one question she often gets from architects is whether her operation is a “certified” quarrier.
“There’s no such animal right now, but hopefully in the near future there will be,” she says.
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Taking on the U.S. Green Building Council® (USGBC) and its well-recognized LEED Green Building Rating Systems™ is a daunting task. While the NSC is working with that organization, Mattke believes the best approach is for the industry to create its own certification for natural stone and sustainabiilty.
By setting up a standard certification process for stone, the industry will be following in the footsteps of other industries that supply building materials, such as brick and wood.
“The idea of there being a standard certification process is to engage organizations such as the USGBC and the EPA (the federal Environmental Protection Agency) and help educate them about stone and what we’re doing,” says Mattke. “But, we also have to make sure that what we do is credible and relevant to the industry.”