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Steve Thomas is the host of Planet Green's Renovation Nation, a program that focuses on making green renovations to homes across the country. In his regular column on PlanetGreen.com, Steve goes behind the scenes of the show and offers additional tips and insight on green renovation.
One of the things that is thoroughly lacking in our industry is precise analysis of the carbon cost of the building materials. Manufacturers, if they have any recycled content in their products, will call their products green. Fair enough. they need to market stuff and that's a marketing gamble. Unfortunately, when it comes down to doing the right thing by the planet, we don't really know how green these products are. It may be greener to quarry something in China and ship it to the United States instead of buying a recycled counter top from a local distributor. I sincerely doubt it, but I can't know empirically until someone has done the analysis. Carbon costs are measurable. Nobody has measured them. I think that the lack of clarity is a big disadvantage in our business.
Having said that, concrete counter tops are a cool product and the concrete allows you to do a whole lot of stuff that you can't do with other materials, like adding recycled glass to the product. It makes it interesting and does divert the waste stream a bit. I can't say how green any given "recycled" counter top is, but I can say that they are cool. They are greenish if nothing else.
Watch the Renovation Nation Episode: Chesapeake Bay, MD—Big Bucks for Retirement
