Heck, even plastic is pretty replaceable as reducing bio-material into plastic isn't unheard of. (The first plastics were made out of casein from milk).
The oldest of those are literally legacies of the first major burst of biological activity on Earth, which released oxygen into the atmosphere, which for most of a billion of years or so resulted in reducing unoxidized minerals, particularly iron, in the Great Rusting.
It was formed and buried in ways that no one could ever see or appreciate it, until now.
A decade or two in a high visibility location is more attention than it ever would have gotten buried under ground.
Not particularly. Travertine and dolomite limestone are hydrothermal depositions. They form quite rapidly, and in some locations you can watch it being formed to this day, like in some areas of Yellowstone (where the travertine is only a few thousand years old at best.) Dolomite is a little slower than Travertine to grow, but what we now understand about its formation also means it was very likely to have been rapidly-formed by simple geologic acid washes over shorter periods of time than we initially thought - read https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidbressan/2023/11/27/scienti... and you'll catch on to what I'm saying.
That's sort of material has a high resale value and usually is sold for reuse in other applications.
Like, if I want to put in new stone counters, in general I'm picking a kind of stone I like, and the firm measures or makes a template of my use, and cuts from a slab, right? If I have a really small job, perhaps it's possible to get a deal from the offcuts of some prior installation. I don't think it's generally an available option to e.g. get measurements and then peruse a list of countertops removed from recent local renovations where the dimensions are strictly larger than mine, and have my counter cut by trimming their 11' linear counter to my 10' space. But given that widths/depths are often determined by (standard) cabinet or vanity measurements, I feel like this ought to be doable, and these materials could have a straight-forward series of multiple uses.
A lot of stone countertops though are actually cheap composites where the slab is mass produced. Like how you can walk into an apartment complex and they all have granite countertops with nearly identical patterns.
That still call themselves granite? Quartz is the well known man-made composite, but it tends to be a little more expensive than granite, not less.
It's like a Home Depot for used building materials/kitchens/toilets/plumbing/electrical etc. Think of carefully deconstructing a 50s ranch built to GI bill specs and carting it off somewhere to sell it.
It's part of "recycling row" where they have a single stream recycling plant and drop off, "CHARM" for hard to recycle stuff like computers and a hazardous waste place for paint / lead / solvent etc.
https://ecocycle.org/services-and-facilities/zero-waste-faci...
https://www.google.com/search?q=reclaimed+marble+slabs&oq=re...
I'd imagine this stuff is pretty local though because shipping heavy stuff like marble too far wouldn't make much sense.
But more importantly there are a lot of kitchen and bathroom renovations (and I _think_ renovations outnumber new construction by a lot ...) so one might think that almost as many countertops being removed as installed, and that a large portion of these could be serviced by recycled ones. The comment from danans asserted that these materials are "usually" reused -- which I am doubtful of.
For starters, Travertine is highly popular in jewelry. When a rockhound passed away here where I live, his custom house was being demolished by the new owners and they invited the community to come rescue any thing they could. I rescued a bunch of the travertine slabs to use as teaching material for new rock cutters.
If there's an architectural design up front then there's a need to source materials that fit the plan, as you describe.
The opposite approach was taken by a friend of mine who was, for a decade, a prolific builder here in Australia .. he continuously had two or three houses on the go in staggered completion (clean builds and|or significant rennovation) that all sold well for their design, uniqueness and craftsmanship.
His starting point was salvage yards, looking for cheap big statement pieces; bay windows, big wall cabinets, doors, window sets, impressive looking ketchen sets, big counter tops, etc.
The next step would be to design a house plan that fitted around quality salvage and well suited the site for views, access, etc.
His arc in life was art school in Victoria followed by | interleaved with a salvage job that dismantled entire (small) towns ahead of dams, flooding, other projects - they prepped wooden houses for moving elsewhere, disassembled structures to "flats", reclaimed historic bridges, etc.
Then came the building that built up his cash reserves, then a big rural property with sheds, glassblowing studios, metal work, etc.
And if that fails, just sit tight and it'll be most of the universe for a few quadrillion years, somewhere between "cold, dark and quiet" and "very cold and very dark and very quiet"
Others are right - the matter is neither created nor destroyed, but you are also right, that form is/was unique, and it is at least a bit sad to know that it's unlikely to be seen again. Take from that what you will, but I take from it that the world will only be like this for a moment, and if I want to see it, the only way to encourage that is to go and see it, not hope that society will realize it needs to (or wished it had) preserve things.
Whether these are the things we'll regret losing - different question, but I'm sure a british museum will hang onto one :)
we should definitely not let it get that far....
Species like Dodo are expected to go extinct as humans flourish and move other things out of our way. All species eventually go extinct. We only exist because we out competed what came before us, which out competed what came before it.
You can mourn the loss of the Dodo not existing in a zoo for you to gawk at but I find that to be on the level of complaining about a TV show being cancelled. If it filled such an essential biological niche that its loss is noticed (it obviously wasn't - hundreds of years went by before anyone noticed it was gone) - if it were noticed, and was such a heavy loss, that's the first niche that will be filled by something else. You can't have Darwinian evolution without this.
The Galapagos Giant Tortoise will never go extinct because the market for protecting and investigating and gawking at them is too strong. If that interest ever wanes the animal will no longer occupy a useful niche and will cease to exist, unless it adapts.
https://www.theonion.com/geologists-we-may-be-slowly-running...
Personally I think of those caves full of ancient crystals, or the stalag[mt]ites in newly unearthed caves. And the lost redwoods.
Wait until you hear what happens to oil...
Rocks brought to the surface, and eroded by water, or plunged into the depths and melted to spew out as volcanoes, etc, etc, etc.
Perhaps the remnants of bathroom tiles will be subjected into the ground and mined in millions of year to decorate a future species bathroom.