countertops

what is the best/most sustainable countertop for kitchens?

i thought wood with a thin layer of stainless steel covering the countertops would be really long lasting and create easy cleaning and maintenance

could do a wood with a good oil

what other materials have y'all used or heard about?

Concrete, tiles, rock, steel plate

I like butcher block.  If you go that direction, build your own or shop around. Some cost a fortune.  I had tile at  one  time, the grout lines were always dirty.

By far, the most popular counters tops are granite. And for resell value too.

Our first house had tile countertops.  I hated them as they were had to clean and dropped things broke easily.

I really like butcher block though when we built this house dear hubby said no!

I like you idea for the stainless steel countertops as it would be easy to keep clean.

I have butcher block on my island and it's amazing. I love it. I love how every injury to it is simply character.

I have concrete on the rest of my counters and it's not ideal.

We had stainless steel in Japan and that is what I want to change my cement counters to. It does show water spots really well but it's easy to clean and easy to clean and did I mention easy to clean?

we have concrete counters in the kitchen that the previous owners put in. i love that you can put a hot pan straight out of the oven on them if needed, but they're hard to clean (and were [intentionally] stained in a way that they wouldn't look clean even if they were), and it's real easy to break glass or pottery on it if something gets tipped over or knocked. tile counter i've had were like that too, with the added bonus, as several folks have mentioned, of having grout lines that woud trap dirt.

stainless would be pretty sweet.

We have butchers block and we HATE them, it's horribly high maintenance, you cannot get it wet or roll out anything out on it as it gets stuck in the grain, it rots round the sink and burns if anything even mildly warm gets put on it. Stainless is probably the "best" in that it will last longer than you and puts up with all abuse and is easy to clean, it's not going to be the prettiest though. We have a large utility room which I intend to turn into a commercial kitchen with full stainless units. the normal kitchen will in time get stone counters of one type or another.

Interesting Pros/Cons article from Treehugger.com
Counter Intelligence

I love butcher block, I found it easy to maintain and it didn't chip all my dishes.
I hate my concrete counters with a vengeance. They will be ripped out, or at least inlaid with kinder material soon-ish.
Granite... no. mountains are for climbing, not tearing up.

John F Dean wrote:I like butcher block.  If you go that direction, build your own or shop around. Some cost a fortune.  I had tile at  one  time, the grout lines were always dirty.

what do you coat the butcher block with? walnut oil?

Skandi Rogers wrote:We have butchers block and we HATE them, it's horribly high maintenance, you cannot get it wet or roll out anything out on it as it gets stuck in the grain, it rots round the sink and burns if anything even mildly warm gets put on it. Stainless is probably the "best" in that it will last longer than you and puts up with all abuse and is easy to clean, it's not going to be the prettiest though. We have a large utility room which I intend to turn into a commercial kitchen with full stainless units. the normal kitchen will in time get stone counters of one type or another.

thank you for your honest appraisal of butcher block — i would have expected more people to have the same complaints which is why i asked one responder what kind of coating they use to protect the butcher block

in terms of the prettiness of stainless, i thought it could be made to look a bit prettier by building the counter out of wood and then putting the thin layer of stainless over the top — this way it looks a little less like a commercial kitchen and still had a somewhat home-y wood feeling to it

Hi Michael,

I will have to check on the tx for the butcher block.  To be clear, our kitchen sink is set into quartz.  I felt it was tempting the fates to put it in wood.

We have granite and I'm clumsy.  Do the math.

We re-did our kitchen last year and went with quartz.  I've always loved the look of carrara marble, but marble is a maintenance nightmare.  Anything mildly acidic begins to etch it as soon as it makes contact, and with all the tomatoes and citrus that we produce and use, I knew that it would be a non-starter for us.  But quartz comes in an unlimited number of finishes so we picked a light/almost white field with an occasional thin vein of grey.  It looks exactly like marble, at a third of the price and a fraction of the maintenance.  It's stunning.

Nothing stains it, everything just wipes off, and it's pretty tough -- no chips since we installed it 8 months ago.  You can't put a hot pan on it directly from the stove, as the material is made of stone dust bound with synthetic polymer that would burn if you put something too hot on it. But we keep a cork trivet handy, or usually just let things cool on the stove before they get transferred to the sink.

And to answer a question raised above, wood cutting boards or butcher block are best treated with salt and mineral oil.  You can find mineral oil with the laxatives in your local drug store.  I use kosher salt, as it's a bit larger and more abrasive.
The salt acts as an anti-bacterial, and the mineral oil conditions the wood.  Lightly scrub with the grain of the wood, let the oil soak in, and then wipe off the excess after a minute or two.  You can put a second coat of mineral oil on and leave it to soak in.

Shop around for quartz.  We live in greater Los Angeles so there are a billion dealers/distributors.  After looking in 30 showrooms, we found the pattern we wanted in a warehouse and then dickered to get a price.  But because the warehouse didn't sell directly to the permies, we needed someone with a commercial license to buy it for us.  In the end, our installer was able to work to get a better price than we did, knocking off almost $500 a slab (the stuff comes in massively heavy 6' x 10' slabs) -- we needed 2 slabs.  Ask your installer to give you the remaining cut-offs if you don't use the whole slab.  We didn't have much left, but enough for a small outdoor cooking island that I built for my BBQ area, about 2' x 5'.  

Chris Sturgeon wrote:
Interesting Pros/Cons article from Treehugger.com
Counter Intelligence

apparently this website has decided formica to be the best overall solution — surprised

an option i hadn't thought of that was recommended on this website is cork — they claimed it is impervious but the cork i know is definitely able to be penetrated so not sure about that one

Hi Michael

To get back, I can't find what I used on the wood. I think it may have been Tung oil.  I remember giving it numerous light coats and plenty of time to cure.  I am saying this because Tung oil is often my first choice.  But I am not certain. I also have an open bottle of Walnut Oil.

There is a little company called AWP out of Horse Cave, Ky that makes a great butcher block product at a low price.  It is not clear to me if they are still operational.

One more advantage to stainless is it makes getting your kitchen cleared as a commercial kitchen much easier (at least in CA and MO).  Steel is also very recyclable.

We are replacing our last (hated) tile counter top with marble and maple. We bought a splitting butcher kitchen table at auction cheap a few months ago. My partner replaced one not so pretty plywood counter top with a piece of it and it now using scrap to surround a piece of marble we had for this last counter.

The counter is to the right of the stove and will be a safe place to park hot pans.

Our island (where most cooking takes place) is maple, the counter with the sink is granite, and we have two stainless restaurant tables that we can move around to reconfigure how we work. I like all three surfaces, but probably the granite least -- dings in steel and wood seem fine, dings in granite seem like flaws forever.

I was doing some research a while back on countertops and I disliked the materials used to make so many of the countertops.... or for more natural options, I wasn't crazy about what you had to use to seal them up.

Slab wood, sealed with a natural oil seemed the easiest to make something natural yourself. But I did come across sintered stone. They use heat and pressure and natural minerals to create a heat resistant, stain resistant, non-porus material. You can't make it at home, and it is expensive... so I doubt I'll have any, any time soon, but it sounds great.

We have soapstone countertops. It’s a slab of natural stone. Essentially non-stick, easy to clean, burn proof, but softer than marble or granite.

But I did come across sintered stone.

I think that material is also called 'manufactured stone', in Australia it has been responsible for the reintroduction of deadly lung conditions because of the dust it creates during machining.
It dumps silica, straight into lungs with death the outcome.
Its been banned within Australia.
Check it out.

EDIT also called Engineered stone

John C Daley wrote:
I think that material is also called 'manufactured stone', in Australia it has been responsible for the reintroduction of deadly lung conditions because of the dust it creates during machining.
It dumps silica, straight into lungs with death the outcome.
Its been banned within Australia.
Check it out.

There seems to be at least two terms being used here in the US. Engineered stone and manufactured stone. All of the articles I see about the dust issue had to do with crystalline silica and were referencing quartz.
This article -> https://www.paramountstone.co.uk/sintered-stone-pros-cons/ claims...

Sintered stones don’t use crystalline silica during the manufacturing process. This makes them safer for both the fabricators and end-users.

Dust is still dust, you want to be careful, but it does sound like sintered stone is different, and does not suffer that same concern.

Okay.  from my research, my most desired one to try would be the Quartz of the commercial answers.  But the dream world would be a mix of counter tops.  Near the oven/stove I would want enough stainless or granite or other heat proof surfaces to put out at least 2 cookie sheets side by side with say an additional 8 inches for piling cookies.  A hard work area probably the quartz and finally the rest in butcher block but covered with a clear epoxy.

I have one low use butcher block in with the clear epoxy that I really like.  So for the few scratches have mostly polished out.  Mine was normal epoxy but there are some that are supposed to be more durable, scratch and heat resistant.  

Now one other possible thought here is a friends cedar strip canoe the fiberglass mesh is just barely visible in its epoxy and the grain still mostly shows thru.  Would this be beneficial to a counter?

Now one other concrete one that I liked was on a trailer/bbq.  The concrete counter was almost 3 ft square and they had done sort of a spiral flower pattern in a glass aggregate.  It was 4 colors of glass a light amber, dark amber, green and blue.  From what the guy said they broke beer bottles up and repeatedly screened the broken glass till they had about 1/8 inch pieces for the aggregate and some finer stuff to be the colored sand.  It sounded like that part was a lot of work.  They then put the glass in big rock tumblers with coarse abrasive to get rid of really sharp corners and roughen the glass so the concrete would adhere better.  Then washed the abrasive out of the glass somehow.  They then used white concrete with stain and the colored glass added and some sort of pattern mold to pour the glass and concrete onto the top and them pulled the mold so they just had the colored patterns in the concrete.  Then poured the rest of the concrete in the back.  Once cured flip it and polish/grind it down to expose the glass and polish to shiny glass.  it was sort of neat and would have been hard to see stains on because of all the colors and patterns.  In one corner they had a bulls eye of glass rings that causes me to wonder if by cutting glass scrap if art and be made in the concrete mixing techniques?  It is my wishful thinking, want to try list.  Wishful thinking doing sort of a cattails as art in the concrete.

After everything I have read on protecting concrete wall with lithium densifier I think it would be my first step in protection a concrete counter top too.  Suggest researching if you go concrete.

Our counter tops are eucalypt finished off with an oil base.  The stove is inset and runs up to the side of the stove. The stove is double skinned so there is no heat. From my experience, stainless steel gets scored and there is some suspicion n the literature that bacteria and gick can sit under the curled edges created.  Metal splinters also end up in the food.

We routinely clean our benches down with hot water and elbow grease. We use a soft brissle brush on the live edges and to clean the joints.  We then use olive oil or bran oil to buff up the surfaces.  There have been no problems since we installed the benched in 1986.  Wood is known to be bacteriostatic so stops bugs from breeding.  About 5 years ago, we pulled out the stove and kitchen sink and refurbished the bench top using a smoothing plane, sandpaper down to 240 grit and reoiled using a japanese plate hand burnisher https://www.quality-woodworking-tools.com/product/japanese-nt-sanding-plate-detail-sander/ I note that there are options to add to angle grinders now. These fill the grain with a fine paste of oil and wood.

From a manufacturer; Avanti stone
Sintered stone is created from a mix of natural minerals that are subjected to extremely high temperatures and pressured together. In forming sintered stone, this process is like that through which natural stone is formed. This would, in turn, yield a stone with a very hard surface that is non-porous, UV-resistant, and can bear extreme weather conditions, making it useful both indoors and outdoors. Sintered stone is associated with a timeless appearance, and varied finishes, making it resemble natural stone in so many ways.
On the other hand, the engineered stone slabs constitutes around 90–95% crushed natural quartz. The rest of the material is made up of 5–10% resin binders and pigments. There is a very high percentage of quartz in the material; it has the characteristic feature of high hardness, giving it resistance to scratching and impact. Resin binders enhance the flexibility and general toughness of the material. Engineered stone’s flexibility and durability make it very popular in countertops, flooring, and cladding. It shows natural beauty with contemporary characteristics.