When it comes to countertops, most people go with natural stone for the kitchen and bath. But Cosentino, a maker and marketer of stone products, is determined to buck the trend with a revolutionary new product.



The company recently introduced ECO, a sleek new countertop and surfacing material made from junk that would otherwise have ended up in landfills. Shattered windows and glass, broken china, old toilets and sinks and residual factory ash are just some of the waste materials now going into the Greenguard-certified concoction readily available.



"People have this perception that for them to go green they have to spend a lot of money or jeopardize design for sustainability," says Lorenzo Marquez, vice president of Cosentino, based in Stafford, Texas. "With ECO, neither of those theories apply because you're not spending more money or jeopardizing the look and feel you want."



ECO retails for $75 to $110 a square foot, depending on the thickness and color about the price of a midrange granite, but without the waste.



"When you're mining stone, there are only a few blocks that you can actually cut into slabs, the rest is put aside for creating sinks, tiles and whatnot," Marquez says. "We take some of that tremendous waste and put it back in the mountain through our reforestation effort because we're a company that's committed to the environment.



"Then we started looking at other materials in the surfacing industry that we could develop without having an impact on the environment," he says.



ECO made its debut in April.



The nonporous surface, similar in performance to quartz, comes in the color collections Green and Revive, which are available in a polished or matte leather texture finish.



The Green Collection is made of 75 percent postindustrial recycled raw material. Its color ranges from white with small specks of gray to black with large flecks of brown.



The lighter the color, the more glass and porcelain in it. Darker colors are created using glass and quarried stone.



The Revive Collection contains 75 percent post-consumer recycled raw materials and ranges in color from white with large flecks of gray to browns with large flecks of darker browns.



To create whites, more glass is used. Darker colors contain more mirrors and industrial furnace residuals.



Marquez has the color Riverbed from the Revive Collection in his home.



"I was lucky enough to be part of the selection process of the colors, not that I'm a designer, but I've been around the industry long enough to know what consumer preferences are, and this was a specific color that I was really pushing for," he says of the color that resembles a gray river pebble with flecks of brown. "It looks amazing."



ECO does not require sealing, which makes cleaning easy with soap and water or light surface cleaners.



Of course, it isn't indestructible. So never use harsh chemicals, place hot pans or cut directly onto the surface because the countertop can be damaged as with most stone surfaces.



"In research that we've done consumers really don't know the difference between a quartz surface or a granite surface, and in the future they won't know the difference between an ECO surface," Marquez says. "So long as it's cold and hard they consider it to be a stone product.



"But we all know how different it is."