Stone is Green

My answer – yes – is predictable. After all, this is a stone magazine, and I’m not going to start slapping my own industry’s hands. Stone and stone-related products pay the bills here; I don’t want to start facing abuse charges, either.
My feelings go beyond any proprietary concerns, however. Mention “stone” in a conversation about sustainable building practices, and the reaction is often disapproving, if not outright churlish. You’d think slabs are being delivered onsite from the sky by B-52 bombers.
Some of this attitude comes from the large amount (80 percent or better) of imports feeding U.S. dimensional-stone consumption. Stone also suffers from the often-peculiar wordplay that sets the material well behind other products with plenty of trendy marketing appeal.
It’s unfair treatment. We’re being squeezed out of the green-building equation with some dubious assertions and double-talk. And we shouldn’t stand for it.
The biggest obstacle comes from guidelines offered by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), which is fast becoming the quasi-official arbiter of sustainable building practices. Its Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design® (LEED) rating system is the measuring stick for testing and touting the green factor in new construction and remodeling.
A massive amount of dimensional stone runs afoul of LEED guidelines with what’s commonly known as the 500-mile-radius rule. The simple explanation, often quoting LEED’s terminology (as I’ll do here) is that materials need to be “extracted, harvested or recovered, as well as manufactured, within 500 miles of the project site.”
That knocks out all that material using diesel-drinking transport and coming in through ports-of-entry, doesn’t it? Not exactly.
Let’s take a look again at that 500-mile-radius LEED guideline by finishing the sentence: “ … for a minimum of 10 percent (based on cost) of the total materials value. (The italics are mine.) If only a fraction of a product or material is extracted/harvested/recovered and manufactured locally, then only that percentage (by weight) shall contribute to the regional value.”
The LEED system doesn’t require that all materials come from within 500 miles; a building only needs 10 percent of value (or weight) to make the grade. Upping that regional share to 20 percent kicks in an additional bonus.
The LEED system allows a builder to accrue points for all kinds of practices, from efficient water use to reducing light glare. A perfect score is 69 points; the minimum for base certification is 26. The allowable credit for 10 percent of materials used within 500 miles – the perceived barrier for stone – is one point.
I’ll repeat that. One point. Or two points, if you meet the 20-percent regional goal.
Unless you’re planning to clad a 60-story building in Zimbabwean granite, the percentage of stone usage isn’t even going to come close to interfering with a LEED ranking. And even if you went all out with, say, Italian travertine, that one point carries as much weight in LEED as providing adequate bicycle parking and changing rooms.
There’s also plenty of domestic stone available, along with still-useful quarries that went dormant when U.S. production waned during the Great Depression. LEED may be the needed push to rebuild a solid and strong stone-production industry.
LEED isn’t an onerous system. It’s a way to encourage smarter, less-wasteful building by advocating good practices. It’s also a set of general guidelines; the USGBC doesn’t certify products with the LEED label, although some product manufacturers produce associative come-ons that can confuse any consumer or client.
As a set of construction guidelines, however, LEED fails to address one major area: lifecycle. It’s another of the confusing sets of words bandied about with the New Green Revolution; it often promotes sustainability as keeping the environment and development in balance, but rarely addresses a parallel definition of the useful longevity of a resource.
Or, to cut through the philosophy, you can’t throw stone in with other extractable reserves. It’s easy to burn off a million-year resource like oil or coal in one trip to the supermarket or leaving the bathroom light on all night. Meanwhile, we’re still waiting for the Pyramids of Giza to fall down.
Stone’s impressive long suit is that it holds up for millennia. It’s not rapidly renewable – it fails that buzzword test – but its total lifecycle impact and cost may be far, far less than almost all other products.
The other lifecycle concern that LEED and virtually every other part of the sustainable movement neglects is represented by a new word that doesn’t get used much: downcycling, where recycling leads to a product of diminished quality. It’s one thing to have recycled or rapidly-renewing materials; it’s another to deal with them after the current use.
A unit of stone can be re-cut and reused indefinitely. It can also be crushed and reconstituted as an agglomerate, used in loose form as decorative/utility ground covering, or buried in the ground as a safe, solid building base and a natural filter for groundwater. It’s a poster child for efficient recycling.
Compare that with other green materials now appearing in the countertop market; recycled paper has a nice, trendy appeal, but its afterlife is heading down the downcycling path. Only recycled-glass slabs such as IceStone® and Vetrazzo® offer a comparable utility and recylcling performance to stone.
It’s hard to get stone’s good message across in the green building-materials market, however, because of a negative perception often fueled by competitors. The Natural Stone Council’s Committee on Sustainability is working to get the positive word out, and it’s a commendable effort.
There’s a place for stone in the world of green building. Don’t let anyone else color your thinking  … or your market.