EcoLocalizer

[Image courtesy of BottleStone, used with permission]

California company BottleStone uses local, post-consumer glass combined with clay and cement to create recycled countertops. They have identified four areas of manufacturing that impact the environment and strive to create their product with as low an impact as possible in these areas. BottleStone is eligible for LEED credits and was a Green Building Winner in the 2008 California Clean Tech Open.

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Friends Paul Burns and Robert Kirby teamed up to form BottleStone. Paul has over 30 years’ experience in the ceramics industry, and Robert is an engineer and consultant who has been working on developing recycled glass as a building material for almost 20 years. Together, they developed this stone-like surface material made of 80% of recycled waste glass. The four areas where they’re focusing on a low impact are:

1. The source of raw materials
2. Emissions and waste during manufacturing
3. The practical life of the product
4. The embodied energy

Raw Materials
BottleStone currently sources all of its glass from local recycling programs in the San Francisco Bay area. As the company expands, it hopes to do the same in new areas - sourcing and processing the glass locally. The waste glass includes more than just old jars and bottles. BottleStone’s process can use discarded fluorescent light bulbs and the waste from window and door manufacturing, too! They take this waste glass, crush it, and combine it with clay and concrete to create an 80% recycled “stone” countertop.

Manufacturing
The glass they acquire doesn’t require any special cleaning, so the amount of water used in processing is minimal. The company goes a step further, though, and recycles any water it does use. The process is cleaner than traditional cement manufacturing, too. BottleStone doesn’t require calcining, a process responsible for about half of cement production’s CO2 emissions.

Product Life
BottleStone touts its durability. What’s more green than a product that last for ages? They don’t require sealers or maintenance like regular concrete countertops, either. If you do decide to get rid of your BottleStone countertop at some point, the materials are recyclable! According to their website, “its high concentration of raw glass will allow it to be pulverized not-unlike the original bottles and reconstituted for other recycled glass products or even future product versions of BottleStone itself.”

Embodied Energy
The product is fired in kilns, just like regular ceramics. The company’s site lists BottleStone’s greenhouse gas emissions compared to other, comparable products. According to their site:

We have made BottleStone in instrumented kilns to empirically determine the amount of energy it takes. We have made one-inch thick BottleStone pavers using 9800 BTUs of green house gases per square foot! This compares to 26,750 BTUs for an equivalent portland cement paver and 20,000 BTUs for a clay paver of equivalent strength.

Price-wise, it falls in the mid-range for countertop materials - more expensive than plastics and laminates and less expensive than engineered stone and most green slab-size surface materials. It’s great to see a company striving to lighten its carbon footprint in so many aspects of the manufacturing process while still creating something that’s affordable. Right now, they’re only serving customers within a 500 mile radius, the limit for “local” LEED certification.

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