Setting the Sustainability Standard in Stone
“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.
Click photo to enlarge“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.”
To create standards that are credible and relevant and will subsequently enjoy the same respect as the Forestry Stewardship Council’s (FSC) certified hardwood program isn’t an easy task. The NSC hired several consultants to help with various aspects of the work, including Jack Geibig, president of the Knoxville, Tenn.-based Ecoform.
Geibig freely admits he was one of the misinformed public who equated quarrying with mining until he started visiting quarries around the country.
“We visited something in the order of 30 or 35 quarries around the country, looking at quarries of different types,” he says. “We looked at marble and granite and limestone quarries, in a lot of different configurations. We did that for the purpose of benchmarking the operational practices and environmental impacts of quarries to see if there were any commonalities to the different types – or significant differences.”
