Published by Martha Danly under Kitchen, Sustainable Design, Sustainable Products

Once they’ve seen them, people crave recycled glass countertops. And it’s no wonder—they have everything going for them: stunning to look at, they capture the imagination, and they deliver the triple bottom line for people, planet, and profit. Intrigued to learn more about the manufacture of Vetrazzo, a product I fell in love with in the showroom of San Anselmo’s Green Fusion Design Center, I called Vetrazzo and asked for a factory tour. Their reaction? C’mon down!

Sustainable design begins with place, and Vetrazzo has selected for its production facility a landmark building with a representative mini-history of manufacturing in the U.S. Having opened its doors in 1931 to produce the Ford Model A, the Ford assembly plant in Richmond, California, was later pressed into wartime service as a production facility during WWII.

Rosie the Riveter happened to be one of the workers here. This place has already delivered two major icons.

Returning to auto manufacturing after the war, the plant devolved into a book warehouse until its recent remodeling and housing of green tech companies—including Vetrazzo, SunPower, a leading solar panel manufacturer, and Mountain Hardwear, maker of fleece from recycled plastic.

Greeted at the open bay door by Craig Murphy, Vetrazzo’s marketing coordinator, I was struck first by the building’s daylighting, an important feature designed by architect Albert Kahn. Although the day was cloudy, the space felt bright and open, owing in part to the massive overhead windows.

We were joined by director of marketing Karen Righthand and VP of manufacturing John Sabol, who walked me through the entire production process, starting with the raw materials—shards of recycled glass, sorted by color and stored in giant, second-use seed bags.

John’s manufacturing job begins with sourcing raw glass. Referring to himself as the “Glass Hunter,” he searches out glass with the highest possible post-consumer recycled content. His insistence on quality presses vendors to higher levels. “Is it waste glass?” John asks. To maintain as low an embodied energy as possible, he turns down glass that has already been melted or otherwise processed. “We’re not just following the letter of the law—it’s the spirit of the law that matters,” he told me.

He also tries to convince suppliers to keep glass colors unmixed. While there are optical sorters at glass recycling plants, the mechanical process is not a perfect one. That’s where the artisan aspect of Vetrazzo starts creeping into the product. As John reminded me, “Because we’re using waste, our product keeps changing.”

Once the glass arrives at the factory, the first stage of the manufacturing process is to mix, shake, and cure a mix of glass and Portland cement into 9′x5′ sheets an inch or so thick. While we watched chunks of cobalt-blue glass from recycled Skyy Vodka bottles get loaded into the mixer, John remarked: “It’s like baking a cake.”

Must be a guy’s way of relating to his female observer.

The cooking metaphor continued when John explained that it’s no simple task to blend glass and cement, as they resist each other like oil and vinegar. That’s where Vetrazzo’s “secret sauce” manufacturing technique comes into play.

After the glass slabs exit the oven, they are calibrated for size, then polished for ten hours by big, automated diamond-head tools that are gradually graded to finer and finer grit. Vetrazzo recycles the water used in the polishing; it is stored in a giant 200,000 gallon tank, then filtered before re-using.

Some panels are left plain; others are treated with a patina stain. The final quality control and inspection stage involves tactility: feeling the glass surface—which is now satin-smooth and lustrous as any marble—as much as looking at it. Just as the raw material sourcing requires talent, the finishing process is also an operation for artisans.

The finished panels are custom-cut to make countertops, table tops, fireplace surrounds, vanities, and more. Vetrazzo’s final product contains 85% recycled glass content, the highest in the industry, and likewise the industry’s smallest percentage of Portland cement. Made entirely in the U.S.A., it comes with a Certificate of Transformation that beats the environmental and labor challenges associated with quarried materials such as granite and marble.

Unlike green home features that are hidden from view—insulation, low flow faucets, and low-e double-paned windows—recycled glass surfaces have the advantage of being highly visible. Karen calls it a green signature that the homeowner can invoke to say, “Recycling takes place here.”

There’s certainly trophy value in these handsome pieces, and they’re bound to start a conversation about the 1,000 bottles and 550 pounds of glass that go into every 9′x5′ panel. Each of the 15 standard colors has a different texture and personality. One of my favorites is Glass House, made from beer and other bottles, whose labels you can read on the pieces of embedded glass.

The Tour de Vetrazzo ends with Craig’s giving me 4″x4″ samples to take home. They’re sitting on the vanity in my bathroom, urging me on to a larger project—subject to budget approval.