Although The Stone Collective officially formed just over one year ago, the ideas the organisation is advocating for – namely, that stone can be used (and reused) for many more purposes than as a “thin wallpaper” – are both older and well-proven, argues Michael Poultney, managing director of Albion Stone and a founding member of the collective. Joining forces in late 2023 and making several appearances at shows and events throughout last year, The Stone Collective is made up of Albion Stone, Hutton Stone, Lundhs, Paye and the Stonemasonry Company.
This month, we spoke with Poultney about the initiative: how it came about and why, what challenges it’s faced and the ground it’s gained over the course of 2024.
Reinventing the wheel
While both stone and ceramic tiling have sector-wide associations aiming to address the entire breadth of challenges faced by their respective industries, The Stone Collective is a much leaner organisation with a much narrower focus, Poultney explains. “The Stone Collective is simply a small group of companies that are interested in pushing a low-carbon stone agenda with two parts to it. One is looking at load-bearing stone and the other is looking at the reuse of stone.”
The companies involved decided on those angles in particular after noticing a lack of interest in stone from the broader construction industry, despite the potential they believe the material holds for lowering the carbon footprint of many projects. The first step towards unlocking this potential, however, is changing some of the construction industry’s fundamental preconceptions about stone as a material – this is the collective’s first and biggest challenge.
“Stone has long been perceived as an expensive product, and because it’s an expensive product, people want to select their interpretation of how the stone should look, “ Poultney says. “That then drives up the price again, so you end up deselecting stone for no good reason other than pure aesthetics.” Over the course of many decades, this cycle has led to a pigeonholing of stone as a luxury surface product, rather than its traditional role as a building material, Poultney says, “just like brick is a building material, just like concrete is a building material”.
Pointing to St. Paul’s Cathedral and Unilever House as historic examples, The Stone Collective argues that previous generations of architects and builders didn’t care whether the aesthetic characteristics of load-bearing stones were flawless or not. “As far as Christopher Wren was concerned,” Poultney points out, “if it was holding up the cathedral, it was in!”
In this sense (although its aims are rather revolutionary in some respects) the members of The Stone Collective see their goal as a return to tradition, one that utilises local, natural resources in an efficient and low-carbon way.
But can it be done?
Of course, construction is a vast industry encompassing countless interlocking processes, all of which contribute to the development of the built environment around us, and attempting to disrupt that organism – even for noble reasons like sustainability – has historically proven incredibly difficult. Typically, cost increases (whether real or perceived) are the biggest barriers to this kind of change.
According to Poultney, The Stone Collective has had particularly positive responses from architects, who are by-and-large the “most enthusiastic” about low-carbon. “The challenge,” he continues, “is to persuade the rest of the construction team that this is not some pie in the sky concept, it’s something that can really happen.”
Worse still, this gap in understanding is only exacerbated by the current trends for stone in interiors. Because “thin wallpaper” stone, as Poultney describes it, is so expensive, it’s assumed that load-bearing stone would be too, when in fact the opposite is true. Produced without unnecessary deselection and with minimal processing, load-bearing stone can in fact be supplied at significantly lower cost than its surface material counterpart.
“If you drive those two points home really hard,” Poultney says, “we’re not talking halving the cost of our stone – we could be talking about reducing the cost by three quarters, maybe more. And as a business proposition, that still stacks up for us. We’re hoping we can persuade the industry that low carbon is also low cost.”
While the economic case for load-bearing stone requires some advocacy, the practical argument is more of a sure thing. As Poultney points out: “The example that the engineers and architects have been repeating for quite some time is that we take stone, and we smash it and pulverise it into small pieces, and then we mix it with horrible cement, which is contributing to global warming, and then we produce concrete, which is actually weaker than the stone we started with originally!”
A few hundred years later
The other prong of The Stone Collective’s argument centres around the reuse of stone. Unlike many building products, Poultney points out, where sustainability is measured in the percentage of recycled content, stone isn’t reused by dissassembling it and reincorporating it into a new product. “Actually, we do a much better job of recycling stone!” As Poultney explains, stone is typically reused either in its entirety, where the rest of a building may be rebuilt around it while the stone components are left standing, or it may be removed from site to be reprocessed, resupplied and ultimately refixed. “In some instances, if you can cut down the stone you might even be able to turn one stone into two, for example.”
As Poultney says, the durability of stone makes it a suitable candidate for reuse without needing to be recycled at all. “Our Portland stone has been gently ‘curing’ for 140 million years, so another couple of hundred years on it is hardly a drop in the ocean.”
Signs of progress
Wasting no time since its formation in 2023, The Stone Collective has already taken several opportunities to communicate its message. By pooling members’ resources together, Poultney explains, the collective has been able to attend shows and command attention that would have been impossible for the individual companies to achieve.
The Footprint+ show in London, for example, is expensive to visit, but The Stone Collective was not only able to attend, it delivered three separate talks at the show. It also featured at last year’s Clerkenwell Design Week, focusing on stone bricks as a type of load-bearing stone. Since late 2024, the organisation has been running talks from The Stonemasonry Company’s offices in Clerkenwell, and it’s currently planning a CPD course to explain the relevant concepts. Beyond these in-person events, the organisation has been very active on social media and its own website.
So, what would success look like for The Stone Collective? “Having some load-bearing projects, it’s as simple as that,” says Poultney. While the historic examples like St. Paul’s Cathedral are fantastic, modern examples such as 15 Clerkenwell Close are even more powerful in persuading the construction industry that load-bearing stone is a viable solution today.
“OK, so you can’t build a Portland stone skyscraper,” Poultney admits, “but I don’t do skyscrapers anyway, and there’s not that many skyscrapers being built today, so I don’t think that’s an issue!” For the rest of those projects where concrete is used as a matter of reflex and convenience, rather than deliberate, thoughtful choice, The Stone Collective asks the industry to consider another way.
www.thestonecollective.org