China's stone industry is becoming a hot spot in the world's stone industry, and promoting the green production of the domestic stone industry is also getting more and more attention from all parties. On June 29, 2024, the national standard "Green Product Evaluation Stone" was officially released and officially implemented on January 1, 2025.

01 Policy Background

As an important decoration material in construction projects, stone has the characteristics of large consumption, high consumption of natural resources, low technical threshold, and serious pollution in the production process. With the improvement of domestic processing capacity and consumption capacity, China's stone industry has become the world's largest stone producer, exporter and consumer since 2005, accounting for nearly 20% of global stone processing and production.

In order to meet the requirements of the green development of products, under the premise of meeting the requirements of product use, according to the overall requirements of the "General Principles for the Evaluation of Green Products", through the constraints from the attributes of resources, energy, environment, quality and other aspects, to further promote the green development of the stone industry.

02 Main Contents

The standard selects three types of products in the field of stone products, such as natural stone and composite stone, resin type artificial stone, and non-machine type artificial stone, which are large in quantity and wide in scope and concerned by the industry and society, and stipulates the evaluation requirements and evaluation methods of stone green products.

Basic requirement

Occupational health and safety management system requirements have been added to the management system; Increased requirements for basic hardware facilities that affect the environment; The impact of adhesives and protective agents used in stone on the environment shall be controlled in accordance with relevant product standards and meet the requirements of strong standards for harmful substances of adhesives.

The basic requirements list the appendix of the relevant product standards for stone products, which requires that the basic provisions of the corresponding product standards should be met, and the requirements are raised by evaluating the index value to open the gap.

Evaluation index

The evaluation index requires the selection of water withdrawal per unit product and waste disposal rate in terms of resource attributes to achieve the purpose of reducing water consumption and making full use of stone resources. In terms of energy attributes, comprehensive energy consumption is selected as the evaluation index. The processing of stone products mainly uses electric energy, and a small amount of fuel is used in transportation. In terms of environmental attributes, the environmental noise of the plant boundary, the concentration of particulate matter in the work area and the plant boundary, and the limit of radionuclides were selected as the evaluation index verification items. In terms of quality attributes, the typical key items of various products are selected for evaluation and selection. In terms of low-carbon attributes, product carbon footprint reporting is required, and the quantitative method of stone product carbon footprint and the information appendix of the declaration report are given, and other reporting formats are not excluded.

Encouraging indicators

Encouraging indicators require the promotion of the use of renewable energy, artificial stone products to increase the proportion of recycled raw materials or renewable raw materials. The requirements of resource attributes, energy attributes and environmental attributes of the standard are consistent with the requirements of the stone green factory building materials industry standard, the index requirements of the green factory are used as the green product value requirements, and the requirements of the green factory standard that are better than the top 5% of the industry are used as the green benchmark product value requirements. By selecting typical key items of various products, the quality attribute improves the index requirements, realizes the purpose of optimization and enhancement, and reflects the requirements of high quality products. In terms of low-carbon attributes, stone is not an energy-consuming industry, nor is it a key area of carbon emissions, mainly electricity, water and transport oil consumption, and only requires product carbon footprint reports.

03 Implementation Significance

The standard is of great significance to establish a unified green product evaluation standard system, promote the green transformation of stone product manufacturing industry, guide the green production of stone product manufacturing enterprises and green consumption of consumers. The stone green product standard is of great significance for implementing the sustainable development strategy, regulating the development of the stone industry and promoting energy conservation and emission reduction, and is also a strong supplement and improvement of the standard system of clean production technology requirements for the stone industry.