Northern Sparkle: NaturStone Corp.,

The company has plans to launch a series of NaturStone™ natural stone products, and intends to become Canada’s first Exotic Gemstone™ supplier to the countertop market.  Future plans also call for the company to begin supplying raw material to the American, Japanese, Chinese and European monument and dimensional stone signage markets before the end of the decade.
It’s an ambitious move for a company that’s been selling primarily in the landscape-stone market, but chief executive officer (CEO) David Greenway feels the uniqueness of the stone makes it attractive to all these markets and beyond. 
It’s also a major paradigm shift for what’s been – until now – a small, family-operated company taking stone from a single quarry near North Bay, Ont.

DISTINCT DEPOSIT
Greenway joined the company two years ago; an experienced businessman, his background is in corporate mergers and acquisitions in the chemical and other industrial fields. NaturStone’s Jeff and Michael Borer, technical director of operations/technology and director of business development and marketing, respectively, have also joined the firm within the last three years and share Greenway’s big-business experience.
“What attracted me to the company is that the stone is so incredibly beautiful,” says Greenway.
Although NaturStone has identified and has plans for developing several more quarrying locations, the initial expansion is being based on a large deposit of a semi-precious gemstone known as aventurine. 
Aventurine is a rare gemstone commonly used in jewelry and for carved figurines. What makes this deposit particularly attractive is that it can produce an extremely large quantity of at least four distinct colors, and two different hardnesses and consistencies.
Greenway explains that geologists believe the stone was created some three billion years ago when tectonic plates deep inside the earth slammed into the Canadian Shield, heating the host rock of clear quartz and colored mica until it reached liquid form, and transferring the color from the mica into the clear quartz during cooling.
Explained in the most basic of terms, the liquid quartz and mica would have behaved like a huge quantity of molten glass under pressure, and after cooling would resemble nothing like quartz crystals.  The end result is a single location with several rare forms of aventurine, which is naturally colored quartz with tiny mica inclusions.
Although the deposit was created horizontally in different colored layers, it was later thrust up vertically into a 10.5-mile-high mountain with the colored layers becoming vertical bands/transitions through the mountain.  This means that now the colors appear next to one another, not on top of each other. 
Through the eons, the glaciers removed the 10.5 miles of mountain top overburden, exposing the mountain’s “roots” as a nearly polished clean 500’ tall, one mile wide by one-and-a-half miles long ancient mountain ridge. It leaves the company with easy access to the different color bands of aventurine, with very little soil or trees as overburden.  According to geological estimates, the deposit runs approximately a mile below the surface; however it’s estimated to contain over 20 billion tons of material sitting above ground.

PLETHORA OF PRODUCTS
“We’re an environmentally friendly, green mining operation,” says Greenway. “We extract the stone that sits above the ground. In fact, we have beaches and lake on our only 200 yards from the mining operation.” 
He’s quick to add that the deposit is primarily on private property and doubles as a great corporate fishing, hunting, and vacation retreat.
The company is particularly proud of its red aventurine, or what they are marketing as Aventurina™ Rosso.  Even within this deposit, the red stone is relatively rare which makes it more valuable than other colors. However, it also costs more to locate and extract the red stone.
“The company has had geologists researching for many years, and until now no other source of true red aventurine has been found,” says Greenway. “It can be used in gem-quality applications, which we’re exploring within the Chinese and European markets. The Chinese are extremely interested in red stones, which they believe provide wealth, happiness, and health benefits.  Red stones in general don’t occur very often in nature and are considered quite rare worldwide.”
Of other materials at the site, Greenway says the Avenurina™ Nero black aventurine is still extremely rare, and – as with the red – the quality is gemlike. The Avenurina™ Verde green aventurine – the third main color in the deposit – is slightly more-common and found in several other places throughout the world.
A fourth main color in the deposit is known as Aventurina™ Verde Oliva™ (dark olive green), and may be equally as rare as the red aventurine.
He adds that the company is not entirely sure what other colors are available in the deposit.
“We’ve selected the four main colors that appear close to the exposed faces, because we know there is a huge resource of those colors.” he says. “We expect to find other rare colors when we do some core drilling. In the past deposits have yielded pinks, blues, yellows and interesting greens.”
One recently discovered and relatively small deposit is a rich gold color known as “Klondike,” an obvious reference to the early 1900s gold rush.
Along with its four main colors, the deposit shows two different hardnesses, or rather “hard” and “soft” materials. Greenway explains that the hard aventurine – which has a 7.2 Mohs hardness, or slightly harder than granite – was formed by heat and pressure combining the existing clear quartz and colored mica, allowing the color from the mica to be absorbed into the clear quartz and resulting in a beautifully colored stone with tiny sparkling inclusions.
In areas where nature’s forces weren’t as great we see a more “soft”material, the result is a “twisted” appearance with veins of white or clear quartz intermixed with veins of brilliantly colored compressed mica flake. Apparently the soft material makes the most exotic forms of the polished stone slabs.
NaturStone is marketing the “hard” stone formation as Aventurina™, and the “soft” stone formation as Elegante™ because of its stunning and unique beauty.

NATURE…AND MAN
Greenway says that research is expected to give a better picture of the extent of the deposit. It’s been mined off and on for some seven decades, but really began to be developed as a viable business about 40 years ago.
“For the first 30 years or so, primarily the business was involved with landscaping and building stone for walls and fireplaces,” says Greenway. “It was historically used in a lot of gardens, fountains and water features. Then, about 1998, the company took the business in a different direction and started exploring the new emerging man-made stone technologies.
Greenway qualifies that statement somewhat. He says while the company’s key business focus moving toward the future will be countertops – both natural and incorporated into engineered agglomerates – there is still interest in aventurine for landscaping purposes. For instance, developer Steve Wynn has looked at the stone for fountains and water features for new casino resorts he’s building in Las Vegas and in Macao, China.
NaturStone is already an active player in the quartz-surfaces market. Greenway says for the past six years, it has been a supplier of the harder version of aventurine, crushed and graded, to one of the major natural quartz surface manufacturers. Beyond that, company officials won’t say much about that aspect of the operation.
Based on that success, the company is currently approaching other quartz-surface manufacturers world wide.
More recently, NaturStone™ has been working to have its stone introduced into the cultured granite market. Greenway says explains that Ashland Inc, a major chemical resin and gelcoat manufacturer for thisthat segment of the industry, has been working on developing ais developing an optimized resin formula that works best with the stone. “We are working closely with Ashland to take this major step towards creating new and exciting stone products,” says Greenway. 
The R.J. Marshall Company, which is by far the country’s largest provider of cultured granite raw materials, has entered into a distribution agreement with NaturStone, with the first of a series of new products expected to hit that market before mid-by the end of 2007.
As with natural-quartz surfaces, the biggest advantage to incorporating NaturStone’s products into cultured stone, is that it looks more like natural stone than most products in that market.  By focusing on those two markets, Greenway adds that it allows NaturStone to utilize its deposit’s yields most fully.
“We tend to use the hard Aventurina material for engineered quartz to get the durability and hardness you need for the surface,” he explains. “When we get into the cultured granite material, it’s the same thing except we tend to use the soft Elegante™ material and the transition material because it gives us the larger flakes, a natural illusion of depth, and the overall attractive look.  We basically have very few waste materials, which goes in line with our environmentally friendly business approach.”

NATURAL DEMAND
Sellers and fabricators of natural stone won’t be limited to man-made products if they and their customers want the gem-like appearance of Aventurine. The company completed its first block extractions for the natural granite stone countertop market this year.
“Three container loads of blocks landed in Livorno Italy on September 17th, they are currently being rushed to the Antolini Luigi SpA exotic stone factory to undergo special vacuum resining treatment and will be gang-saw-cut to create polished slabs for countertop use.” Greenway explains. Their slabs will be added to the already extensive product range carried by Antolini.
Greenway says the stone’s appearance at StonExpo last year generated inquiries from several companies worldwide excited with the prospect of developing both the Aventurina and the Elegante as natural slab countertop materials, thus driving the company’s block-extraction plans into high gear. Marva Marble & Granite Inc. will be the first distributor in the U.S. market, displaying the material at its Stone Galleria™ and Stone Boutique™ in Portsmouth, Va.
He adds that NaturStone believes a shift in the countertop market, with more emphasis on high-quality unique stones and stones that show more grain and vein, will help drive the company’s products in that market segment.
“Because of the two basic formations and the layered nature of the stone, we’re able to take one material and cut on several angles to produce many different – yet equally gorgeous – appearances,” says Greenway. “Everyone is looking for something new and unique that fits their own tastes.  Our stone’s unique nature and the way the market is heading are fitting beautifully with what we can bring to this new product area.”
Because of what the NaturStone executive feels will be a high demand for the stone, he says logistics are critical as the company moves to the next stage of its development.
“Our biggest concern is that demand for our countertop slabs will outstrip our ability to produce the large stone blocks which the slabs are cut from,” says Greenway. “We’re lining up the right partners and gearing up for high levels of production. Antolini’s quarry master arrived in Canada in September to evaluate and work with us to create a quarry plan for extracting blocks.
“We are creating plans for storage and shipping of the block. We want to make sure that whenever our new products are introduced, we can meet the customer demand for it.
“We’re definitely not worried about the demand for our stone.”

This article first appeared in the October 2007 print edition of Stone Business. ©2007 Western Business Media