by aleida, on January 4th, 2010
On our last day in the Bay Area we were welcomed into the manufacturing facility of Vetrazzo, LLC by Karen Righthand, VP of Marketing, and John Sabol, VP of Manufacturing. The company is based in Richmond, CA and makes a sustainable surfacing material marketed as Vetrazzo that is composed of 83% recycled glass aggregate added to a cementitious binder.
Inside the facility, it was almost impossible not to want to play with the recycled raw material that lay in enormous white sacks (which themselves are recycled from the food industry). There was glass in deep blue, light blue, clear, red, green, brown, multi-colored… and we could tell where it came from. The clear glass, for example, was nothing but broken Corona beer and Smirnoff vodka bottles. Remnants of the labels warned about the dangers of consuming alcohol. Impressively, a lot of the material is locally sourced. Vetrazzo itself has its own network of nearby suppliers who divert their waste stream into the Vetrazzo plant. Of all the cullet that goes into the slabs, about 15% is post-industrial, 10% is specialty (both post-industrial and post-consumer, such as traffic lights, runway lights, stained glass), and the rest is post-consumer.
The manufacturing process is fundamentally simple. The ingredients are measured, mixed with water, stirred, and poured. They pour each slab one at a time. (Shockingly, the base of the containers onto which the mix is poured is made out of PaperStone, a product we recently covered here.) An accelerated curing process follows, and then each slab goes on to the calibration and polishing stations. With the help of water, both the front and back of each slab gets ground down to programmed specifications. The resulting sludge then goes into a large machine that filters it and runs the water back into the polishing stations. The slab components filtered out of the water (a white, chalky mix of fine cement and glass) are taken out, put into a big dumpster outside, and given away for further use as the raw material for another local company who manufactures it into a product for roads and paths.
A slab can be poured either with an integrally colored, or a basic white matrix. If a white matrix is used, a slab could go from polishing to coloring, where a simple concrete stain is applied to the face of the slab. This darkens the color of the matrix without altering the color of the aggregate, and yields the “with Patina” line of products.
The whole operation is extremely impressive, as is their building itself. They occupy one section of a vast Albert Kahn-designed structure originally built as the west coast manufacturing facility for the Model A Ford in 1936. After almost fifty years of neglect, the building underwent extensive restoration and, in 2006, Vetrazzo became the first tenant to move in. Five rows of enormous skylights, along with large windows on one side of the building help to keep their large chunk of space well lit with minimal use of light bulbs. A one megawatt PV system on the roof helps to offset the electrical use of all the tenants.
It was truly awesome to see how these products come together, from the still intact bottles and other glass pieces, to the final beautiful, shining slabs patiently waiting by the door for their owner to come get them.
Thank you so much, John and Karen, for all your time!
Click the icon below for more tour photos.
Thanks for your blog post:)
[...] tour of Vetrazzo’s Richmond, CA manufacturing facility (reviewed here) introduced us to more than just a fascinating industrial process. We also learned the story behind [...]