HydroBlox Technologies makes novel stormwater drainage products from 100% recycled plastics, and the hardest of them to work with — types #3-7.
Ed Grieser, CEO HydroBlox, says his products are cheaper, easier to install, and longer-lasting than traditional French drain systems.
He describes his brainchild as boards made of thousands of “noodles” of plastic, pressed together. They’re buried underground to suck up high
volumes of accumulating water and redirect it to aquifers or other desired locations. His flagship product, HydroPlanks, moves rainfall along at 14 gallons a minute, while filtering out fines.
The systems lay under stretches of the Appalachian trail, highways, sports fields, and railroad tracks. They manage water runoff on green roofs, at construction sites, in parking lots, and residential yards. And they help control erosion on landfill slopes, hills that tower over oil and gas pipelines, and other infrastructure.
While lightweight, the plastic planks have compressive strength twice that of manhole covers that endure extreme loading daily, so the product is ideal for heavy-duty, civil applications Grieser says.
“It’s because of the way we put the boards together. When you compress them, they become stronger. They bind together and stay together,” he says.
Some end users are departments of transportation, utilities, and landscapers. Among feedstock suppliers are businesses who themselves are working on recycling solutions for the most complex polymers; they turn to HydroBlox when they don’t have a good answer.
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