Sorry about that title.
I’m curious about quarry waste, and whether that’s a resource that can be better utilized. Quarries that produce architectural stone end up rejecting stones that, due to inherent flaws or damage in the quarrying process, don’t meet architectural standards.
Quarry waste at Halibut Point, Gloucester MA
Given a mason with the time, discernment, and connections to select individual stones from an active or semi-active quarry’s waste pile, and the skills to build tightly and elegantly with them, this stone can make a beautiful wall with a character distinct from fieldstone and fieldstone-veneer walls.
Rockport granite. Halvorson Design Partnership, David Phillips, and Cambridge Landscaping
Even without skilled masons, you can do some fun things with quarry waste, and at the same time turn a quarry’s disposal problem into a profit opportunity. (The rocks shown below came from the waste pile of the quarry that was supplying landscape curbs for the same project. The main costs to the client were my time and travel, the packing and shipping of the twenty boulders on two flatbed trucks, and a day’s work by a four-man crew to set the boulders in place. No new quarrying was required.)
Mankato limestone. Halvorson Design Partnership and JL Burke Construction.
But for the most part, neither the quarry industry nor the landscape industry is set up to take advantage of this resource. It seems that an enterprising quarry, if wiling to split and sort its waste stone into more easily-used sizes, could develop a new market, albeit with thinner profits than its architectural product.
Are there obstacles that I’m not seeing? Would other quarries be as willing as the Mankato Limestone quarry to let a landscape architect scramble over their waste piles? Could quarry waste be priced competitively with salvaged fieldstone? Or are there quarries out there that are already doing this, and if so, how does it vary by region?
Deborah Howe
Toby Wolf
One of the interesting things about using quarry waste as you have is that it will develop its own patina over time. As the stones weather in situ their coloring will come to reflect their orientation to sun and the prevailing winds, and lichens are likely to form in response to those and other site influences.
Stone weathered in one place and reused elsewhere brings with it the signs of age, and is desirable for that. There’s something to be said for watching those signs develop on site, though, in the stone’s complex set of reactions to the particular situation of its new home.
I think I’ll look around for quarry waste in Kansas. Limestone is what’s quarried around here most of the time. Carthage Marble is quarried in Missouri, and they have a showroom in Kansas City. I’ve gone to their boneyard before and gotten some great pieces, but those are stones that have already been worked into something – countertops that cracked, pieces salvaged from old houses and buildings, and once, a set of marble steps from a bank building.
Thanks for emailing me about this post. This definitely relates to work that we are already doing with reclaimed quarry stone for other corporate partners as well as our own blend of fieldstone.
Most of the processing of this type of rubble is difficult from a transportation and shop efficiency point of view, but varies based on the specific characteristics of the stone. Some of the pieces of the rubble along the beach above has some great pieces in it. However, typically, quarry waste is very irregular and triangular (wedges).
While we already work up rubble blocks from quarries, A lot of what we do with fieldstone is essentially the same as reclaiming quarry rubble, because we process pieces of fieldstone that would be unsuitable for stacking applications. I video taped myself over the weekend with a couple of pieces of raw stone. You will get a kick out of the video once I upload it to YouTube.
Lastly, even angular stone that is difficult for masonry construction can be good for decorating your outdoor environment with ground cover, water features, etc. I am doing more marketing around those products and if they are labeled and demonstrated properly I think they will be incorporated more often.
Side Note: Please email some pictures of the jobs your client did with our stone, I would love to see if I recognize it/look at the photos every day.
Second Side Note about Rockport Granite:
Recently I dined at the Gibbet Hill Grill for my mother’s birthday. It sits in the middle of a cow pasture on a hillside overlooking the historic buildings of Groton and Lawrence Academy. The fireplace was all built with a building veneer cut on site by the masonry out of Rockport Granite reclaimed from a couple of different foundations and then mixed back together. The fireplace is definitely a worthy field trip for any stone and fireplace lover who likes food and ambiance.