Comment by zebrafruit
3 days ago
It’s interesting that the focus is on porcelain as a cooking surface but misses the biggest reasons for it displacing engineered quartz or granite for countertops. There’s a few factors at play here leading to the prominence of porcelain.
For the induction cooktops, you can cut porcelain slabs to 6mm compared to your 3cm (sometimes 2cm) quartz and granite. This is also why you can use it for walls and floors. The thinner materials allow the magnets to actually function.
The manufacturing process for engineered quartz is now being interwoven with silicosis through the legal system, leading to manufacturers marketing “low silica” quartz at a cost premium. This premium is closing the cost gap with porcelain. This is the main economic and legal reason as jurisdictions- Australia and maybe soon California look to ban these products forcing the market towards natural stones.
If you’re then selecting from natural stones, porcelain is essentially used as printer paper for whatever stone pattern is desired, and given that people tend to want things that look like marble, this “ink” is essentially free for the manufacturing process, making the porcelain look like marble more than quartz or granite.
Engineered quartz is also not a great exterior material, again yielding to porcelain.
> The manufacturing process for engineered quartz is now being interwoven with silicosis through the legal system, leading to manufacturers marketing “low silica” quartz at a cost premium. This premium is closing the cost gap with porcelain. This is the main economic and legal reason as jurisdictions- Australia and maybe soon California look to ban these products forcing the market towards natural stones.
This is wrong, and the response to it was misguided.
The problem never was the manufacturing process, as manufacturers, especially in Australia, are well aware of occupational hazard.
The problem was people cutting engineer stone dry and without respiratory protection. You can’t really dry cut anything that vaporises or aerosolises without creating some kind of hazard. There was one 26 year old guy here in Australia who’d been cutting engineered stone on site, dry, with no or insufficient respiratory protection, and was expected to check out before turning 30.
The response, banning the products is misguided, because natural stones present approximately the exact same risks. Namely, you can aerosolise any stone and deliberately hoof the particles and expect good outcomes.
The correct response was to ensure the people working with the product follow the correct safety protocols.
But this being Australia, next time something like this happens, Anika Wells will just ban us from talking about it, if the toxic Labor-Greens federal government get their way.
The fabrication for install is the issue, yes.
But: Natural stone has nowhere near the same magnitude of damage from the same level of exposure. And often it's not on-site (or outdoors) and the people working in those facilities are getting far more damage than the ones working on natural stone.
Engineered quartz looks like natural stone because it has depth and translucency, and each piece is somewhat unique because it is made by hand sprinkling various powders into a mass that gets pressed and cured. This is also why it sells for as much as natural stone. Porcelain may be physically superior but it does look like "printer paper".
> Engineered quartz looks like natural stone...also why it sells for as much as natural stone.
I mean, it doesn't actually look like natural stone, though. At least not the mid-to-high-end stones. (Or sell for as much as it.) The floor can be similar if you're looking at some of the cheaper natural stone options, but the ceiling is extremely different. And the really unique depth and transparency of natural stone pushes much more toward the ceiling. Engineered quartz looks like a composite with some tells. I did some extensive shopping for countertops last year, it very much has a specific look. It just looks *different enough& from entry-level countertop options people are most familiar with that it doesn't (yet) read "cost-cutting" to less-familiar renters or buyers. And it presents a lot of attractive durability aspects to people concerned with that re: natural stone. Eventually I have no doubt that it'll be prevalant enough—if not regulated away—that it'll be pattern-recognitioned as "2020s basic" kinda like a modern formica.
Porcelain is also not widely seen yet, which presents the same benefit (especially because many of the "basic"-grade/inoffensive options that flippers or apartment builders want have practically no depth to them even if they're true natural stone!).
Many natural stones are, depending on precise application, pretty bad for exterior use.
Learnt a lot here thanks