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Can a broken bottle be a thing of beauty? It can when it is recycled into a countertop.
Vetrazzo is quickly gaining a national following for its eye-catching surfaces made from shards of recycled bottles.
Dazzling in more than two dozen color combinations, the countertops start plenty of kitchen conversations, living up to Vetrazzo's motto: "A story in every surface."
"When anyone sees one for the first time, there's this 'wow' moment," says Olivia Teter, Vetrazzo's co-founder. "It's inevitable."
That first impression may lie behind the sales momentum this green product is enjoying. Vetrazzo expects to sell more than 110,000 square feet of its unique material this year, up 32 percent from 2009.
"Even though the building industry was hard hit by the economic downturn . . . demand for our product stayed strong and steady, and we've continued to grow," Teter says.
Vetrazzo has 450 certified fabricators and more than 600 authorized retailers in North America (see accompanying box for a Tampa Bay area dealer). The company expects to test-market its product this year in local home improvement centers.
At $125 to $165 per square foot polished and installed, the glass countertops are comparable in price to other high-end materials. They're also extremely durable, stain- and heat-resistant, antibacterial and certified green.
"It's the Superman of countertops," says Gene McDonald, president of Refresh Interiors in St. Petersburg. "You can put the hot pot on it. You can cut on it."
Each 9- by 5-foot smooth slab uses up to 1,000 post-consumer bottles and weighs about 700 pounds. Recycled architectural glass and manufacturing waste also make it into the mix, which is about 85 percent glass combined with a cement-based matrix. The slabs take about four weeks to create.
Many experts tout Vetrazzo as one of the most environmentally friendly surface materials on the market. Vetrazzo's Floating Blue — a color combination that uses skyscraper windows with clear recycled bottles — won the 2009 Reader's Choice Award for best new green product from Interiors and Sources magazine.
"I like it because it's a departure (from granite or other solid surfaces)," says Sacramento, Calif., interior designer Mary Ann Downey. "All that ground-up glass looks wonderful.
Teter, a longtime product designer for such companies as Walmart and Target, had her own "wow" moment when she had a recycled glass countertop installed in her home by Vetrazzo's inventor, Don McPherson, a Berkeley scientist. She was so impressed that she became a partner in the startup company five years ago and pushed its rapid expansion.
"You get all these little hits of color," Teter says. "The labels are silk-screened onto the original bottles and bits of those labels survive the (manufacturing) process. They're fun to search for. It's like a treasure hunt in your surface.
"It tells you how the glass was used, where it's been," she continues. "It makes you think. Vetrazzo starts a conversation about recycling without saying anything."
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