Independent Limestone Company holds the Natural Stone Sustainability Standard-ANSI/NSI 373 designation as a Gold Quarrier and Silver Fabricator for its operations in Bloomington, Indiana.
Independent Limestone Company holds the Natural Stone Sustainability Standard-ANSI/NSI 373 designation as a Gold Quarrier and Silver Fabricator for its operations in Bloomington, Indiana. In 2020, ILC became only the 10th company in the world to earn this distinction.
The ANSI/NSI 373 Standard was created by the National Stone Council to recognize sustainable environmental, social, and human health practices in the natural stone industry. Increasingly, architects and designers are requesting that the materials in their buildings be certified as being sustainably sourced and produced to meet green building standards.
The ANSI/NSI 373 standard required the company to meet minimum standards in nine separate areas including energy usage, water usage and management, health and human safety, land reclamation planning as well as multiple good governance provisions. Each area of the company’s application was evaluated and graded by NSF International, a third-party certification firm operating worldwide in over 150 countries.
Because of its rigorous nature, the NSI 373 certification is accepted by green building codes worldwide including LEED and Living Building Challenge. Use of ILC’s certified stone makes a project eligible for higher point totals from these codes and, often, higher resale values because of the higher rating.
As part of its NSI 373 certification, ILC has set a goal of reducing its energy consumption per ton of stone produced by 5 percent per year by 2025. Off-road diesel consumption, which accounts for 90 percent of total quarry energy usage, will be reduced by monitoring heavy equipment traffic, improving efficiencies in engine performance and reducing haul mileage.
ILC also completed an extensive expansion to its crushing plant. At the plant, ILC takes the extra stone that falls from the rock bed during the mining process and instead of leaving it as waste, crushes the otherwise unusable stone into various grades of crushed stone that is used by commercial clients in multiple applications during the building process. ILC has also invested in improving stormwater containment and management systems to protect the local watershed and ecosystem.
In 2022, ILC helped create Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) for natural stone cladding, flooring and countertops in North America. EPDs are increasingly required by architects and designers to calculate the environmental impacts of building materials, particularly embodied carbon. The very low embodied carbon of ILC stone makes it the greenest choice for demanding architects. ILC was one of 11 natural stone leaders in North America and members of the Natural Stone Institute who contributed their performance data to this EPD effort.