Are Stone Veneers Environmentally Friendly?

Renovating your home can create a sizeable negative impact on the environment. Stone veneers provide a way to avoid this impact, ensuring that your remodeling reduces your carbon footprint, safeguarding the planet we all love.

Stone veneers are environmentally friendly due to being durable, low-maintenance, and easy to recycle.

Let’s now dive into why stone veneers are a great choice for you if you worry about the environment and how you don’t have to choose between being ecologically friendly and having a beautiful home.

 

Stone Veneers Are Eco-Friendly

Here’s a quick overview of why a stone veneer is great for the environment:

• It’s naturally occurring (we’ll discuss manufactured stone later).
• Stone can be maintained without the use of harsh chemicals.
• It doesn’t rot or burn like wood, meaning it releases no greenhouse gases after use.
• Stone veneers are durable and rarely need replaced, reducing any carbon footprint associated with maintenance.
• Ecologically sound quarrying means that the impact on habitat is minimal.
• Stone can be recycled and used again.
• As a natural resource, stone is abundant (we live on a giant rock!).
• The use of stone is more in harmony with the natural world, having been used for thousands of years by humanity before the pollution seen during industrialization.

 

Stone and Climate Change Explained

There are big problems in the construction and manufacturing industries in terms of how resources are being used. This is a real concern if you care about the world and its future.

These issues are something savvy homeowners think about more and more as the impact of climate change becomes increasingly apparent.

The problem is to do with greenhouse gases, most notably, carbon.

When carbon is released into the air, it locks in warmth, increasing the temperature. Increased temperature means, erratic, violent weather patterns, rising seas swamping our coastlines and cities, and soaring temperatures past 50C, making some places uninhabitable.

We all have to do our bit to mitigate this damage, and that’s why being conscious of how we build and remodel homes and how that impacts the environment, is so important to the modern homeowner.

Using both natural and manufactured stone veneers is a great way to style your home and protect the environment, guilt free.

 

The Embodied Carbon Problem

It’s estimated that construction contributes 39% of carbon emissions globally. While 28% is due to burning fossil fuels and energy consumption, a staggering 11% of global carbon emissions are a direct result of what’s known as ‘embodied carbon’.

Embodied carbon is:

1. How much carbon is contained inside a building material, meaning it can later be released into the air through burning or slowly decomposing.
2. How much carbon is released into the air during gathering and manufacturing of a specific building material.

TLDR: We need to build and renovate our homes out of materials that release less carbon into the air, so that we, our kids, and their kids, have a beautiful and safe world in which to live.

This is where stone veneers come into play. Save the planet and have a beautiful home? That’s a combination we should all get behind!

 

Stone is More Durable

Durability is king. The more durable a construction material, the better it is for the environment because it doesn’t need replaced or maintained. Both of which would increase the carbon footprint of any material.

Stone veneers defy the elements. Think of the highest strongest mountains, how they loom down at us and stand the test of time. Stone keeps going, come rains, shine, hail or storm.

Even in the unlikely event that your stone veneer is damaged, stone maintains its grain, colour, and complexity throughout. So, if it’s damaged slightly, it still keeps its natural beauty.

One last thing on durability, think of how stone veneers stack up against other building materials like wood and concrete. Even treated wood rots eventually. And concrete has a limited lifespan, especially when reinforced with metal.

Even cement has serious environmental challenges as a building material. It accounts for 5% of all CO2 global emissions!

Stone veneers last indefinitely, reducing maintainance and replacement, boosting the planet friendly nature of your home.

 

Sustainable Quarrying

You might be concerned that the quarrying of natural stone causes unnecessary damage to the environment.

But you needn’t worry!

Sustainable quarrying techniques have been widely adopted, ensuring that landscapes and animal habitats are well taken care of.

Sustainable quarrying of stone materials includes:

• Planning access roads to go around sensitive areas rather than through them.
• Using innovative technologies to reduce dust production.
• Turning quarries into beautiful habitats for wildlife once they have been used.
• Powering drills and transportation vehicles with renewable energy sources.

And this is all before we even think about the hazards of other building materials. Cutting down trees for wood, producing oily plastics that animals choke on, and using paints containing harmful chemicals!

Stone is much more friendly to you and the environment than other building materials.

As you can seen, sourcing excellent stone for your home can now be done in a way that is conducive to a better future for all of us.

 

Why Recycling Stone Matters

Building materials contribute negatively to the environment in two ways. We’ve already mentioned the production of carbon during manufacturing and transport, but there is another way that building materials do damage:

Whenever old materials are thrown out, they end up in a landfill.

Landfills are vast deserts of decaying and non-decaying waste that stain the beauty of the countryside.

A staggering 30% of all building materials end up as such waste. Worse than that, 75% of wood, clay tiles, and drywall is disposed of in landfills.

Concrete itself accounts for 85% of all construction waste.

We clearly need to do better, and natural stone allows us to do just that.

Let’s say you want to change the veneer on your building down the line: Great! That stone can be repurposed, ground down, and then used to create other stone products, even bricks.

Stone can be reused again and again, making it one of the best materials for your home if you are conscientious about the environment.

 

The Best Stone Veneers For Your Home

Before we talk about manufactured stone and whether it is good for the environment or not, let’s take a quick look at some of the most environmentally sound types of natural stone you can use.

At Pacific Art Stone, we’ve brought these excellent eco-friendly choices together into separate collections to help guide you when choosing the best option for your desired look.

The Westlakes Stone Collection is comprised of quartzite, granites, marbles, and limestones, all presented to evoke the powerful whimsy of the Pacific Northwest and its sprawling mountain ranges.

Our Altera Stone Collection creates a warm, elegant look to any building façade with rich sandstone, quartzite and limestone offerings.

Speaking of Limestone, our Sophia Collection presents natural stone to capture an Old-World majesty that is timeless.

Finally, our Highland Stone Collection is designed to be easy and affordable to install. These premium stones are cut into simple panels, and when put together they are truly awe inspiring!

 

Is Manufactured Stone Eco-Friendly?

It’s clear then how environmentally sound stone and stone veneers are, but an assumption is often made that manufactured stone veneers must be as bad for the world as other man-made materials like plastic or concrete. But the truth will surprise you.

Manufactured stone veneers are a great, environmentally friendly way to decorate your home.

Manufactured stone is generally a composite of different stones, aggregate, and colourings brought together safely to create a specific aesthetic look.

While natural stone veneers are great, manufactured or faux stone veneers have a few tricks up their sleeves to protect the environment as well:

• Manufactured stone doesn’t have to be quarried, meaning habitats are never affected.
• Faux stone veneers still don’t rot or degrade like wood, and so they do not release carbon into the atmosphere during or after their use.
• They can often be broken back down into a slurry and then recycled.
• Manufactured stone often weighs less, meaning that less energy is required for transportation and installation.

 

Manufactured Stone as Good as the Real Thing

At Pacific Art Stone, we offer one of the largest selections of premium manufactured stone materials.

Our most popular collection, the Phoenix Mountain Collection, comes in two forms:

• Stacked Stone: Each brick and section of stone expertly captures the organic beauty of natural stone, for a rugged and pleasing aesthetic.
• Modern Stack: These bricks maintain the grain and appearance of natural rock, but are cut to stack on top of each other perfectly. A best-of-both-worlds between rustic stone veneers and a modern, contemporary look.

Phoenix Mountain has the colours and specifications for almost any taste, and at a competitive price point.

We are also the leading West Coast distributor of the ProVia Stone Collection, with each piece of ProVia molded and handcrafted to be indistinguishable from naturally occurring rock.

ProVia manufactured stone uses oxides and raw pigments creating a real and lasting look of class. Safe for the environment and beautiful, ProVia is more than worthy of your attention when remodeling. It really will wow you and your visitors.

 

Remodel Your Home and Protect the Environment

The bottom line is that both manufactured and faux stone veneers bring beauty and style together while making sure you, the home owner, protects the environment for future generations.

At Pacific Art Stone, our local distributors are standing by to help you create the beautiful, sustainable home you, and the planet, truly deserves.