A friend of mine has a problem; his company makes and installs countertops. The granite ones are real nice but the very heavy leftover waste takes up a lot of time, money and manpower to take to the dump. This cost is eating into their margin.
Any Dopers have any ideas or experience in alternative uses for this left over stone? Could it be sold to a concrete plant? Landscapers? What uses can you come up with for this product?
Cut up and sold as samples? Garden stepping stones? Pond bedding? I guess the problem is that one side will be shiny and it will actually look like a broken-up kitchen countertop.
Coincidentally, when my soapstone countertop was installed I asked them if I could have the cut-out material from the sink holes. They said no because they used it for other things. I’m pretty sure I paid for it though :dubious:
My granite company contracts with a recycler to take our granite cutoffs and use them to make backfill. I’ll get more info when I am at work tomorrow. We get a couple containers of it a week, many thousands of pounds.
Oh and re: Patty, we actively discourage customers from using cutoff pieces and cutouts. Invariably they put them on top of the counter or on some other surface which is then destroyed by the rough surface. Or they drop it on their foot, break three bones and sue us.
No, I did not make that up.
We sell the installed counter tops, any thing extra is waste, if they want a lazy susan etc. they have to pay for the manufacturing costs. It’s spelled out pretty clearly in our contract.
Crush and use to make terrazzo?
Colon Blow!
The stuff for landscaping is quarried rotten granite and I doubt grinding up regular granite is worth the wear on the tools. Selling it to a garden center or landscaper may work out for them.
It’s hard to think of a material better suited to simply be dumped into a hole in the ground.
How about surface plates?
Rob
Do you mean the reference plates used in manufacturing? Those are extremely expensive highly precision machined items made out of “real” granite, not one of the dozens of rocks the decorative stone industry calls granite. They are several inches thick so the 2 and 3cm material we consume would not be applicable.
Soapstone is valuable for carving, and for things like griddles; I would guess they sell their remnants to some soapstone supplier.
The little pieces of granite that are left match the countertops, right? Why then not have them cut and polished into strips and sold with the kitchen as listello’s, that is decorative lining, accentuating tiles? Narrow strips do fine for this purpose, but he could also combine several little chicklets (say one inch by an half inch) and paste several on backing.
I got these recently for my own kitchen and they seemed like a perfect way to use up little pieces of beautiful stone.
Or he could sell the pieces to a company that makes these listellos.
Clean fill like this shouldn’t be going to a dump, it should be filling a hole in someone’s backyard. Maybe he can pile it up and have a landscaper take it away once a month to use as cheap fill.
Wow. Your friend takes money for granite, but he cares about his margins?