Luck Cos. officially launches Luck Ecosystems division

Luck Stone analyzed its quarry byproducts about two decades ago and tried to come up with ways to reuse them.

One route Luck Stone took was to partner with Virginia Tech’s Department of Crop & Soil Environmental Sciences to determine how its quarry waste could be reused. After university researchers sampled the company’s quarry byproducts, they saw there was potential to create soil media from byproducts of the company’s Greene County Quarry in Ruckersville, Va.

After two decades of development, Luck Stone launched Luck Ecosystems as a business this fall. The division takes Luck Stone’s aggregate byproducts and blends them with compost, sands and other raw materials to be used as environmental and recreational products.

Joe Carnahan, Luck Ecosystems’ general manager, says the company spent the last two decades creating different recycled products from its Greene County Quarry waste.

“We began to develop products like premium topsoil to help growing plant life,” he says.

With two decades of research and development completed, Luck Stone created four categories of products: CourseScience, which is golf media; FieldGem, which is ball field mix; GreenScience, which is growing media; and RainScape, which is for stormwater management.

“Before, these products were just something we did as a small part of Luck Stone quarries to address the initial problem of managing byproducts,” Carnahan says. “This year, we decided to formalize what we do by calling it Luck Ecosystems.”

Carnahan adds he’s heard of other quarries reusing their waste product this way, but he says he doesn’t know of any quarries that have created a whole division for this yet.

Carnahan says Luck Ecosystems’ performance media products removed 68,000 tons of overburden material at its Greene County Quarry in 2014 alone. By next year, he says Luck Ecosystems will likely be able to reuse materials from some of the other Luck Stone quarries for different products, as well.

Carnahan says Luck Ecosystems has been primarily selling its products in Virginia, North Carolina and Maryland. He says he is excited about future opportunities for Luck Ecosystems and the positive impact it can have on the environment.