Fighting Urban Sprawl and Decay With Stone for Building Renovation

Urban sprawl and urban decay are such chronic and rampant problems in the western and developed world that you probably don\’t have to go far from where you are right now to see their effect.  Urban decay is, in part, what happens when previously operated buildings are abandoned.  These buildings are not deconstructed and replaced with the rural land and trees that were there before them.  Rather, they are left as eyesores and instead, those who inhabited them have moved on to new buildings – resulting in urban sprawl.  Urban sprawl has to do with further and perpetual development outward and away from major cities.  Urban sprawl means choosing to develop on new land, rather than renovating existing structures.

So urban decay and urban sprawl are very much related.  It\’s actually hard to say which one causes the other.  But both phenomena are not environmentally friendly.  Urban decay is like littering on the largest of scales. Instead of a crumpled up piece of paper though, you have an abandoned building left laying around.  Urban sprawl causes more rural land to be developed and also spreads out our population, meaning more pollution from commuting.

Both urban decay and urban sprawl can be curtailed with a singular approach – renovating existing structures, rather than building new ones. It is in this way that stone for building renovation becomes a huge player in environmentally-friendly building practices. Perhaps if it wasn\’t often times more efficient to build a new building instead of renovate an existing one, urban sprawl and urban decay wouldn\’t be so prevalent.

Well it depends on how building owners and operators choose to renovate. Renovation costs skyrocket because some deconstruction is often required before renovation can begin. Many times, existing building systems have to be undone before new ones can be put in place. But not in the case of StoneLite® lightweight engineered stone systems. Stone renovation systems from Stone Panels, Inc. are capable of being incorporated over the top of existing systems. Very little (if any) deconstruction of old stone systems needs to occur for a building to be renovated with StoneLite® lightweight engineered stone systems. It is possible to kill the two birds of urban sprawl and urban decay with one stone – or at least one stone renovation system.