Building with Stone: Humankind’s oldest material also one of the most eco-friendly

By Elizabeth Thomas

It may seem backward, but you can go green by going gray. Or tan. Or red. Or, well, green, so long as you can find the right rock. But more than coming in any color imaginable, natural stone is the perfect building material for those looking out for the environment because of its frugality, local availability, durability and ease of maintenance.

Frugality

In 1998, the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) established a Leadership in Energy and Environment Design (LEED) green building rating system. The system is described on USGBC’s website (https://new.usgbc.org/leed) as a “framework to create healthy, highly efficient and cost-saving green buildings.” Since its inception, the LEED system has become “the most widely used green building rating system in the world,” according to its website.

This system defines sustainability as saving energy, water and resources and generating less waste while supporting human health.

More than any other building material, natural stone shines in the “generating less waste” category. It is possible to use every pound of rock removed from a quarry. Some is cut into blocks, some is made into thin veneer, some is used for flagstone and still more is crushed up to make gravel. Even the sand-sized rocks created during the gravel-making process can be used by landscapers as setting sand.

Beyond that, quarries work closely with engineers, the U.S. Forest Service and U.S. Bureau of Land Management to ensure that detailed plans are in place to restore the natural habitat of the land once a quarry is permanently closed down. These reclamation plans can be over 40 pages long and cover everything from which seed mixes to use to the slope the ground will be regraded to.

The goal is to quarry as much usable rock as possible while ultimately returning the land to a similar or improved post-mining use. This means that in most cases, the land is better contoured, has better drainage, is less prone to erosion from runoff and even has more plant growth than before mining began. For quarries on public lands, even that usable rock is closely monitored and regulated by federal and state government agencies.

Local Availability

Quarries dot the United States and the world, meaning that for any given project site, there will be a variety of quarries within 500 miles from which to source stone. Just like getting tomatoes straight from the garden, the greenest building project is the one that uses stone from right across the street.

One easy way to find which quarries are closest to a building site is to look through the membership directory at naturalstoneinstitute.org, which also has a map feature for easy use. The Natural Stone Institute is a trade association with over 2,000 members in over 50 countries, many of which are in the United States, making its directory a pretty good “phone book” for the industry.

Each Natural Stone Institute member agrees to uphold a code of ethics that prioritizes happy customers, integrity in business, research into new techniques and client education. Each member also pledges that “high standards of health, safety and product quality will be incorporated into every installation.” The Mine Safety and Health Association has outlined and polices health and safety standards in the United States. It posts all citations to its website, MSHA.gov. When researching local quarries, it’s best to also look the quarry up there to determine if it fits the LEED tenet of “supporting human health.”

Durability

There’s a reason all the world’s greatest, most ancient monuments — the Egyptian pyramids, the Colosseum, Stonehenge — are all made of stone: Stone is the most durable material known to humankind. It is less reactive than metals used for building, more hardy than wood and less likely to crack than concrete (which uses stone in its creation, anyway). If a building is meant to stand through the ages, humans use stone to create it.

Having to only build something once not only saves manpower, but means those materials can be easily reused or incorporated into the building’s renovation when the time comes. Some stone materials available in the market today are actually recycled materials reclaimed from previous installations, ready for another use. This means entire buildings can be recycled instead of thrown in the landfill when a community is done with them.

Ease of Maintenance

Installed stone needs minimum upkeep and can be largely ignored for years at a time. But even though stone is durable, its beauty is not invincible and is prone to change over time — that is how it was made and shaped in the first place. If stone is to continue to look the same as on the day it was installed, some periodic upkeep is required.

Just like wax helps to protect a car, a sealer can protect stone. A good sealer will help preserve the agent used to bind the stones together, as well as protect the stone from stains, salt corrosion, UV rays and other potential hazards. Sealers need to be reapplied when they start to wear down, but the timing of just when that happens changes based on how much use the stone gets. A good sealer should last a handful of years. Seal it and forget about it.

When it comes to keeping stone clean, any cleaning agents used must be low in acidity so as to not harm the stone. The best cleaning agent, actually, tends to be simple soap and water. If something more intense is needed, such as when a hurricane has passed through and left stone tiles misty, a professional cleaner can be called in to refinish the floor.

Stone care really comes down to just those three things: Seal it, wash it with soap and water, and if things get really hairy, get it refinished.

There is nothing quite like walking on a stone patio at night without shoes on so you can soak in the last drops of sunlight through your feet. Humans are as close to stone as we are to the plants and the falling rain. It is part of our history, and it is part of us. Humankind has been using stone to build our homes and gardens for millennia and modern governance makes ways for us to continue to harvest bits of Earth without causing harm. Visit a quarry and you are liable to find herds of elk nearby or a few lizards hiding among the pallets. There is beauty everywhere, and quarriers work hard to share it.

Elizabeth Thomas is a third-generation member of a stone industry family. She works at American Stone in Murray.