Recreating natural looking materials from recycled content is the goal of many new “green” products. If we can stop taking more out of the environment and create products from waste instead of raw materials, we can begin to make the cliché “close the loop” a reality. We’ve covered a plethora of these materials on 3rings, from Paperstone, to Stone Source’s composite collection, to 3form, the list goes on and on.

Squak Mountain Stone .

Squak Mountain Stone competes with these products in terms of look, function and recycled content. What’s special about Squak Mountain Stone is its handmade quality. Ameé Quiriconi wrote an economics paper in graduate school for an assignment based on Michael Shuman’s book Going Local: Creating Self-Reliant Communities in a Global Age. The thesis was to find an externally produced product and develop a way to make it a locally produced product. From this paper emerged Squak Mountain Stone.

The product is made from paper that couldn’t be recycled because it had been crosscut by shredders. Portland cement is then added and combined with crushed recycled glass and coal fly ash from an electric plant in her home state of Washington. The resulting sludge is then hand-cast in slabs that perform like stone and resemble soapstone or limestone. Squak Mountain Stone is easy to work with and can be field cut. It is a minimum of 49% post-consumer recycled content.