Many A Stone Unturned

January 6, 2004

   It happened to me the other day on the telephone when explaining the stone trade to someone seeking some background information. After 10 minutes’ worth of overview on countries of origin and the best stone for certain applications, I paused for a question.
   “OK,” said the person on the other end of the line, “how much stone is available in the world?”
   “You mean what’s in all the yards for fabricators, or at factories waiting to be worked?” I responded. “That’s a pretty tough call. Maybe there’s a WAG number somewhere ….”
   “No, no, not that,” the caller came back. “How much stone is still in the ground? When are we going to run out of it?”
   “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know how many people even think about it. After all, there’s probably something just about anywhere on the planet, including your own county.”
   Silence followed. A lot of silence. And then a few words came back: “You … you’re kidding. There’s that much?”
   The simple answer is yes. And, the complicated answer is, quite honestly, still yes. For the average fabricator or customer, stone supply is a matter of ordering the material and waiting for the delivery truck.
   In a way, it’s a cavalier attitude about a non-renewable natural resource. Aren’t we talking about something like crude oil or coal, where there’s a finite supply and making more will take a couple of million years’ worth of heat and pressure?
   From that perspective, dimensional stone looks like a wasteful business. Maybe we should worry about the Sierra Club picketing the next home-decorating show or small-boat flotillas stopping container shipments around the globe.
   Nah. Breathe easy. There’s plenty of stone to go around. Keep grinding and polishing, because we literally haven’t scratched the surface of the earth yet to find all the sources.
   Before this sounds like an excuse to plunder the land without mercy, let’s play what-if with a couple of numbers.
   A conservative estimate that Stone Business recently calculated showed that the United States will import approximately 2.7 million metric tons of slabs and monuments in 2003. Now, let’s say that we limit U.S. annual marble imports to that annual amount in perpetuity, and India exports are exclusive to the United States.
   So, when does the marble from India run out? Based on Indian government estimates from the April 2003 Stone Business “Insight on India,” we’d have to look for a new source in March 2434. (Marble reserves in India run to 1.2 billion tons.)
   That’s one type of stone from one country. And, that’s only estimated reserves based on current quarrying.
   Of course, nothing last forever, particularly with tough-to-find varieties. Cream marbles with good structural integrity can’t be excavated from anybody’s backyard, and borderline-quality stone of all kinds is the bane of established stone supplier worldwide.
   However, good stone is in anything but short supply, and overall depletion is something that won’t happen for at least a couple of millennia. By then, fabrication will likely be happening off-planet, giving a whole new meaning to Galaxy Black.
   Maybe the best perspective on this comes from a popular study of another resource. Salt: A World History, by Mark Kurlansky. The book describes the perception of something we take for granted that had another status in the past.
   If anything, Kurlansky’s research illustrates how little we knew about the earth and its resources for millenia. Salt’s worth in the past came from its scarcity, with most of it claimed through massive seawater and brine evaporative works. Not until 1807 did British chemist Humphry Davy isolate sodium as an element, allowing for further research on salt.
   Until well into the 1800s, a salt mine was considered a rare resource by any country lucky enough to have one. Finally, with a better understanding of geology, natural salt discoveries became common.
   To some extent, the same process is happening with dimensional stone. Quarries operate on every continent except Antarctica, making stone anything but a rare commodity. With the exception of some superexotics, such as stone with significant amounts of lapis lazuli, any particular variety (or a similar-looking one) can be sourced from several different countries.
   All of this talk about the continuing explosion of stone availablity throughout the world is pretty ho-hum for the industry, where new sources are often more of an annoyance than a help. (“What, it’s another guy wanting to sell me Uba Tuba? Hey, I can’t hear you over the saw. Right?”) More granite slabs arriving in the United States causes little excitement.
   Those outside the trade, however are amazed. There’s still a general impression out there that stone is high-priced and scarce. Finding out that neither is true will only increase its popularity and use. The upside is that we’ll see the stone industry grow exponentially in this decade; the shady side of the coin is that stone will become even more of a commodity and luxuriously high profit margins will become a memory.
   From here on out, quantity – both in stone quarrying and production – isn’t a problem at all. Quality is the key to success … and if you’re ignorant about that, you’re doing more than just playing dumb.