Sustainability as Structure: Cosentino Puts Industrial Ecology into Practice

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Today, it appears each model describes itself as “sustainable.” The phrase seems on packaging, web sites and press releases so usually that it’s at risk of dropping its that means (architects take be aware: we’ve written about this earlier than!). However each every now and then, a agency or an organization comes alongside for which sustainability isn’t a tagline; it’s an ethos.

On the earth of architectural supplies, Cosentino is a kind of uncommon examples. From its base in Almería, Spain, this family-run firm has reworked from a neighborhood marble processor, based again in 1945, into one of many world’s main producers of architectural surfaces. The minds behind designer favorites like Silestone and Dekton proceed to innovate; they’ve just lately introduced a groundbreaking new materials that pushes each efficiency and sustainability to new heights: Ēclos. The story behind the brand new product is a microcosm of the model’s mission. But to know what makes Cosentino totally different, you need to look past its merchandise and dive into its philosophy.

Innovation as a Approach of Life

At Cosentino, innovation and sustainability have at all times been two sides of the identical coin. Every new materials the corporate develops is each a technical development and an environmental experiment. When Silestone revolutionized the countertop market within the Nineteen Nineties, it redefined what engineered stone might be. When Dekton arrived in 2013, it launched ultra-compact surfaces constructed to final a long time.

Now, with Ēclos, Cosentino has taken one other leap — this time by creating a completely new class of floor expertise: the Inlayered Mineral Floor. Developed utilizing proprietary Inlayr® expertise, Ēclos fuses a number of mineral layers to attain sensible 3D depth, veining and texture that reach by the fabric’s thickness. It’s made with a minimum of 50% recycled minerals, with some colours reaching as much as 90%, and it’s fully freed from crystalline silica, marking a serious well being and security milestone.

A New Benchmark for Architectural Surfaces

Swatches of Ēclos shade choices, from left, Tajnar; Legnd; Phantome.

Ēclos isn’t merely a brand new aesthetic — it’s an indication of what occurs when design, engineering and sustainability converge. The floor provides excessive influence resistance, thermal tolerance as much as 220°C (428°F), and improved flexibility that permits for bigger slab codecs and finer detailing. In sensible phrases, which means architects can use it for every thing from kitchen islands to vertical cladding.

However maybe its most vital innovation lies in its intent: to indicate that materials progress is at its finest when undergirded by an moral method. By eradicating crystalline silica and incorporating recycled content material, Ēclos embodies Cosentino’s perception that true innovation should maintain the methods — human, environmental — it touches.

In consequence, Ēclos isn’t only a product launch; it’s a press release of Cosentino’s ethos, and the course the corporate is heading. (Others within the supplies business, take be aware!).

A World Model in a Distant Panorama

Cosentino’s industrial park, seen from above. 

Not like many design corporations headquartered in main cities, Cosentino’s story begins removed from Spain’s metropolitan facilities. Its huge industrial park sits within the arid area of Cantoria, in Almería, surrounded by desert hills dotted with huge expanses of greenhouses. For the corporate, this geography isn’t a logistical problem — it’s a defining benefit.

As a result of the group round Cosentino is small, the corporate’s success is inseparable from the vitality of the area. In a spot the place rural flight threatens to empty native populations, Cosentino has invested closely in sustaining tradition and alternative. On prime of being a motor for native employment, it invests in instructional packages for native college students and cultural initiatives in close by locales, guaranteeing that the group sustaining the corporate can, in flip, maintain itself. This definition of sustainability is as a lot social as it’s environmental.

Sustainability as Survival

Photo voltaic panels that energy Cosentino’s campus. 

An organization based mostly in a distant area can solely endure if its ecosystem endures too. In Cosentino’s view, sustainability isn’t a company add-on — it’s existential. Cosentino’s services run on 100% renewable electrical energy, reuse 99% of course of water, and incorporate recycled minerals into their supplies — the impetus for this method shouldn’t be merely that these practices look good in a report (to be clear, they do), however usually because they make sound enterprise sense.

Just like the greenhouses that cloak the arid earth in close by areas, Cosentino’s campus embraces the unrelenting daylight that beats down on the area for over 3,000 hours yearly. To this finish, over 60,000 photovoltaic panels have been put in to seize this photo voltaic vitality. In the meantime, closed-loop water methods preserve sources and decrease prices: this funding in water therapy is already paying off in spades whereas its close by cities reap the advantages.

Likewise, new round manufacturing fashions are securing the corporate’s independence in a resource-constrained world. Why not discover methods to make an earnings on what would in any other case be a by-product? Briefly, the operation exemplifies that what’s good for the planet can be good for the underside line. This pragmatic idealism — the concept that doing proper by the setting additionally means investing within the firm’s future — is a long-term technique that expands commonplace definitions of sustainability.

An Industrial Superb, Revisited

One other view of Cosentino’s industrial park within the mountains of Spain’s Almería province. 

Cosentino’s method may really feel radical within the twenty first century, however its roots attain again to the earliest experiments in socially oriented design. Within the 18th and nineteenth centuries, figures like Claude-Nicolas Ledoux and Robert Owen imagined utopian industrial communities. Ledoux’s Metropolis of Chaux positioned a saltworks on the coronary heart of a wonderfully ordered society. The British mannequin village of Saltaire did a lot the identical, pairing factories with entry to training and housing properties to assist employees’ well-being.

By the early twentieth century, Ebenezer Howard’s “Backyard Cities of To-morrow” and Tony Garnier’s “Cité Industrielle” expanded these concepts, merging business and ecology in self-sustaining settlements. Every imaginative and prescient, in its personal method, argued that manufacturing and place had been interdependent. In Cosentino’s Almería campus, these historic beliefs discover a modern echo. It’s not a utopia, however a functioning mannequin of what an industrial ecosystem can appear like when designed with long-term sustainability in thoughts. From Southern Spain to world shops, the corporate’s ongoing evolution proves that this holistic definition of sustainability doesn’t must be summary or aspirational; it may be operational, measurable, and even worthwhile — the logic of an organization that plans to be round for generations.

Sustainability as Innovation, Innovation as Sustainability

A kitchen richly detailed with Cosentino’s new Ēclos floor. 

For architects, the connection between innovation and sustainability is more and more clear: essentially the most forward-looking supplies are these designed to endure.  In an period when “greenwashing” could make even honest sustainability efforts appear suspect, Cosentino’s method feels refreshingly grounded. The corporate doesn’t separate environmental efficiency from financial pragmatism or social duty. As an alternative, it treats them as the identical downside to resolve — a methods design problem that architects will instantly acknowledge.

Architects right now discuss regenerative design, buildings that give again greater than they take, and Cosentino’s instance means that producers, too, can function regeneratively. For architects specifying supplies, it provides not simply technical assurance, however a narrative value sharing — one which aligns with the rising cultural demand for transparency and care in design.

In the meantime, as world design strikes towards circularity and local weather duty, Cosentino provides a strong reminder: the way forward for structure relies upon not solely on what we construct, however on how we make the supplies that make it potential. For architects trying to specify surfaces that align efficiency with objective, Ēclos marks a brand new chapter in that story — a fabric constructed not simply to final, however to maintain.

Architizer is thrilled to announce that the 2026 A+Product Awards is open for submissions! The clock is ticking — get your merchandise in entrance of the AEC business’s most famed designers by submitting right now.