Going Green

We will start by letting you know a little about the product you are intending to buy. Natural stone, believe it or not is the most sustainable building material available today, it has little impact on the environment by the way it is quarried. Generally, green energy is used to power the factories that produce the stone, water is recycled and very few chemicals are used to produce the finished product.

Production time is very quick and large sources of energy are not required to produce natural stone tiles and slabs. Damaged or broken tiles are reused to produce smaller tiles; inferior quality tiles are sold to third world countries where the quality of tiles required isn’t so high. The waste material is reused right the way down to the dust particles which are recycled to produce cement and quartz materials.

All in all the production of natural stone tiles is a green industry. Where do we do our bit, well we start by only buying large quantities of goods at a time, we use containers to transport our materials because they are much more economical and don’t have such a big carbon foot print as lorries and smaller vehicles. Where we can container ships or trains transport our materials, again these larger vehicles do not have such an impact on the environment around us.

We have also taken steps to reduce our waste; pallets are reused from one order to another, when we have damaged tiles we cut them into smaller tiles or sell the gravel to be used by third party companies. We have also stopped printing on our boxes; this not only reduces costs but also reduces the amount of chemicals used and reduces the need for more companies to be involved in producing the finished item.

Where possible we will always purchase the thinnest tiles we can, this reduces waste and also means we can move more materials in our containers again reducing the impact on the environment.

Natural Stone Installers employ a national distribution company to deliver the tiles in the UK, by doing this the carbon footprint of our deliveries is reduced because full lorries are used to transport the goods around the country rather than small individual deliveries, which use much more fuel and require more vehicles.

In our offices we are using energy efficient light bulbs, we switch off all our electrical supplies off when no one is in the offices or warehouses, we are buying a new fleet of vehicles ensuring they are all the most fuel-efficient on the market. We have stopped sending invoices and letters to our clients we try and make all our communication by email as to reduce the amount of paper we use.

And, in the very near future we will be contributing a percentage of every sale to help green business produce more rain forests and grow more trees to cover our carbon footprint. As we said we are trying are hardest to help the planet and hope you can appreciate the efforts we are doing to reduce the impact of our company.