Cultured Marble’s Eco Trend
Marble Industries new Robal Glass
Monroe Industries thinks it’s time for the cultured marble industry to embrace the green trend. To spearhead this journey, they developed Robal Glass, an environmentally-friendlier solution for such applications as vanity tops, shower bases, and wall surfaces.
Robal Glass is made with two types of recycled glass, some used in construction projects, whereas others are post-industrial glass that never made it to store shelves. The recycled glass is then cast in a soy-based resin.
Despite using the same tools and molds, Vice President Bonnie Webster says the difference in manufacturing this product comes down to the casting process. “It doesn’t cast like calcium carbonate or aluminum trihydrate based products. We needed to develop the technology in developing the right particle packing to have a true solid material,” she says.
The company is currently working on showcasing the technology to the architectural market right now, says Webster. At some shows the company has gone to there is a lot of interest in the product, “A lot of them crowd around our booth because they simply wanted to know what it was. They had never seen it before,” Webster says. Among the most common questions she got concerned price comparisons to solid surface (it’s less) and whether or not the material is customizable (it is).
In an effort to spread the green trend, Monroe is taking a unique step and licensing the technology to other companies. Luciana Industries and Syn-Mar Products are the first to take advantage of the situation. “This is a product that can set our industry apart from other industries,” she says. “Cultured marble has always had a stigma that everyone does the same thing differently. We have a new product made the same way whether you buy it here or elsewhere,” she says.
