In the NY Times Home & Garden section this week, there was a small article on another recycled aggregate concrete countertop option: Eco, by Cosentino. If you’re like everyone else, if you hear the words ‘green’, ‘eco’ or ‘environmentally friendly’ you’re pretty much ready to gouge your eyes out with a rusty spoon. Me too.

So why is this a good thing?

Short of living in the woods naked while growing our own food and never going anywhere, pretty much anything we do is going to have some kind of impact on the planet. Minimizing the impact is the greenest thing we can do.

For a long time now, recycled building materials have had a higher price point than conventional materials. Even this ECO product is priced in the $68 – 118/SF range. But many concrete products out there have come down to the $50-60/SF range, like New River Concrete Countertops.

Granite has come down in price to as low as $45/SF in some cases. But granite isn’t green. Unless you wait around another 4.5 billion years, the earth isn’t making any more of it. And getting it to the project site isn’t green, either. I personally shy away from granite because everyone and their brother has it, & I’m allergic to the beaten path.

Mainstream hope for green

Preferences aside, it’s an excellent sign that places like Lowe’s are picking up these products. Even IKEA added DuPont’s Zodiaq Quartz product to their countertop options. Very, very good news for two reasons:

1. These products are pushing into the mainstream market, where many people get exposed to them without a lot of sales pressure in a showroom, and see they are within reach of their budget.
2. The availability of these products in the big boxes and affordable marketplaces will begin to drive down the price of green materials industry-wide. In turn, green will start to overtake the conventional materials market.

Good for the wallet, good for the planet. If every material has its drawbacks, why not go green anyway? At the very least you’ll sleep better. Even if you’re not under a tree.

New River Concrete Countertops

Got a call recently from a company in Grayson County VA that makes concrete countertops and sinks. They sent me 4 samples of their countertop materials. They’re beautiful: very earthy with enough variation to keep it interesting.

One man’s trash = another’s treasure

What’s different about them is their aggregate: it’s sand and gravel that comes from the New River. Specifically, dredged from behind a couple of dams on the New River, where it collects and must be removed regular to keep the dams healthy. What’s even cooler is how little impact the process has. The aggregate is already smoothed from tumbling in the river itself, and it’s not mined, the river also does that.

Looking for LEED credits?

They also go another green step and have replaced a portion of their Portland cement content with fly ash, and they use low VOC sealers. And they are only 3 hours from the Triangle. So credits are available for

• Recycled Content
• Local Regional Materials
• Low Emitting Materials

http://newriverconcretecountertops.com/

What’s it made of, how does it fit together, what holds it up?

One of the things I’ve always loved about design is learning about what’s behind what you initially see.  Best way to do that is to look before it’s done.

Progress shots

We’re doing a 30″ wide 4 drawer base cabinet with a bamboo countertop.  Our plan design is here. I decided to do bamboo for this section because it was a stand alone section next to the fridge, and we’re going with a solid surface for the rest of the countertops.

This top isn’t attached yet, I was dying to see what it looked like with the dark drawer fronts. Verdict: thumbs up. My brother in law was surprised to learn that bamboo is harder than maple. We’ll still use a cutting board, though.

Still to do for this section:

• attach end cover panel
• connect under cabinet lights
• hang horizontal cabinet over fridge space
• attach toe kicks

What’s in it?

IKEA®: AKURUM 30″ 4 drawer base cabinet, NEXUS brown/black fronts & cover panels, metal drawer boxes, LANSA pulls, blum soft closures, AVSIKT aluminum doors on wall cabinet, GRUNDTAL under cabinet light bar. Countertop by Totally Bamboo.

[where:27603]

Or, as the cool kids say, Frosty.

With all the chaos lately from hurricanes and financial debacles, I’m a tad delirious. Actually it would be great if I could be as durable and UV proof as some of the engineered stone countertop products out there, Like Ice Stone. If wood or bamboo weren’t an option in a project, I’d go with Ice Stone. Here’s why:

• it’s made from 100% recycled post consumer glass waste and concrete
• it’s 99.5% inorganic material rendering it very safe in terms of toxins (no VOC’s) and fire resistance
• it’s heat resistant like stone, but not as porous
• it’s the first and only durable surface to be cradle to cradle certified. so if you ever want to take it out, you can recycle it again
• for commercial projects it counts toward LEED points
• comes in a gazillion colors
• can be used outside and does not discolor with exposure to UV
• at $45 – $90 / SF cost, it’s competitive price wise with granite, stainless steel, marble and concrete

Greening the product AND the process

Additionally, IceStone is committed to sustainable practices within its manufacturing and supply chain operation. They’ve adopted goals for energy conservation, carbon emissions, water use, and waste management. IceStone will become carbon-neutral, purchase renewable energy credits, and will continue to reduce energy use per square foot of product produced.

I’ve been reading up on wood for use as a countertop. Interestingly, up until the ’60′s, wood was still a staple as a kitchen countertop. But then along came plastic, i.e. plastic laminate. The Formicas and Nevamars took hold, and the false notion that wood was an unsafe food prep surface spread.

Funny how milions of wood cutting boards continued to be sold, isn’t it? And what happens on most cutting boards? Food prep! So the humble wood countertop faded away. Until now.

The design blogosphere has been buzzing about the recent discovery of radon in granite countertops. Radon is a radioactive gas that can cause lung cancer, and when homes are inspected, it’s one of the things they check for routinely. Now, not all granite is radioactive, and those that are emit at low levels. Still – a health risk.

So. In addition to possible radioactivity, granite just isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. For one thing, it’s not green: we take it from the earth and it never grows back. Then we ship it all over the place, and it’s not cheap or easy to haul around heavy slabs of rock. One company sells granite that comes from 63 different countries.

What else? It cracks. It scratches. It’s heavy. And every real estate ad touts it as a buying feature that “everybody” wants (I still haven’t figured out who this “everybody” population really is). There are no perfect countertop materials (although engineered quartz comes pretty close). But getting granite just because everybody and their brother has it isn’t a great reason. Getting it because you really want it and love it is a great reason. Just make sure you run a geiger counter over it before you have it delivered.

Yesterday, for the second time in a couple of months, someone chuckled at my suggestion to use bamboo as a countertop or flooring material. It dawned on me that the image coming to their mind is something out of Gilligan’s Island – something that conjures up tiki themed parties and knick-knacks (of which I’m guilty of owning a few).

The bamboo surface *I’m* talking about is created in a way that’s smooth, so it’s more like plywood than rough terrain. It can also have interesting variation in grain and pattern, depending on which way it’s cut through the stalk. Bamboo building products are made by laminating strips of bamboo together with low VOC adhesives and a hot press. So a whole bunch of strips put together make a large piece to work with just like you would with plywood.

One company that makes bamboo construction products is Plyboo. My sample box came the other day, and it includes several tongue-and-groove, horizontal and vertical grain, butcher block parquet, and panel and veneer samples. They all look great, whether naturally finished (similar to beech) or caramel finish (similar to oak). I wouldn’t use the darker finish in a small space, though. Bamboo has the same warmth of more commonly used hardwoods like oak, and is basically the same to work with, construction-wise. Bamboo is harder than maple and lighter than oak, and requires the same maintenance as hardwoods. More on bamboo at Wikipedia.

What makes bamboo green is that it’s rapidly sustainable – it replaces itself in 5 years. And Plyboo uses water based, low VOC solvents and finishes. And it’s beautiful! I can’t wait to do some countertops with this stuff.

In the Triangle area, you can get Plyboo products at Caragreen, which is located at 109A Brewer Lane in Carrboro.

[where: 27510]

This cement based solid surface from Material Raum Form is a nice option to typically angular aggregate terazzo or glass aggregate concrete.

It reminds me of that weird drink in the 90′s that had those suspended bally things, but it looks far more cool, and is fortunately inedible. Like Orbitz should have been. via

From the site:

“Pearlnera® can be used for worktops (for example, countertops for kitchens), and it can also be laid like floor tiles. It’s emission-free, and does not pollute the environment in any way. Both the optical appearance of the material itself and the range of possible colourings open entirely new ways of creating attractive designs for various living spaces. Pearlnera® has been thoroughly tested for its quality and properties.”