🤖 "Next Generation Urban Materials"

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Host: James McWalter
Guest: Greg Johnson | Co-Founder & CEO | AquiPor Technologies
Category: 🤖 Technology

Podcast’s Essential Bites:

[0:13] “AquiPor is […] a startup company. We have been developing a permeable hardscape material technology, which basically is like concrete, but it's permeable. And it can take the place of traditional concrete and asphalt to help communities manage stormwater on site and mitigate urban flooding. And along with that material, we've also been developing some other technologies that go into our stack that make us […] position ourselves as […] an engineering procurement construction management company for green infrastructure projects.”

[4:50] “US cities are responsible for discharging something like 1.2 trillion gallons of polluted sewage, wastewater and stormwater into clean waterways every year. Now it's becoming mainstream, because we're seeing these huge rain events. And all of a sudden you have urban flooding. And so people are looking at it like […] a real problem, whereas before it was more about protecting water bodies, which is very important. But now it's also like protecting property and lives.”

[5:29] “Our material right now is precast. And so it's very similar to how you would make […] precast concrete and the way that you pour it. What's different is we use a proprietary cement. […] We are utilizing a cement that is not Portland cement, and has an inherently tiny carbon footprint. […] We pour the material, it sets up pretty quickly, it can set up in as little as 30 minutes, which is also kind of an industry first, but then from there we do need to heat it and so we heat it […] from 150 to say 300 degrees, […] that facilitates the permeability, you take it out, and the product is pretty much ready to go.”

[8:40] “Our material needs to be used or utilized with corresponding really competent engineering. So you can design these systems to have full attenuation or partial infiltration where some of the water gets piped to another area where you can recycle the water. […] And all of this is going to depend on the underlying soil's capacity to take on a good amount of rainfall. There are some soils that are pretty impermeable, just naturally and so you're gonna have to design for those type of parameters. But the ideal is […] let's get rainwater or stormwater back into the ground naturally, to […] recharge groundwater and replenish the natural cycle.”

[10:50] “The ground is our best filter. And that's not a perfect scenario either if you have soluble toxins that are getting into soils. So […] what we've tried to develop with this material is to have such small porosity that the vast majority of total suspended solids are filtered onto the surface. And what we know is that dissolved metals, some of these other dissolved toxins attach to total suspended solids. And so if we can just filter the solids, where they can now be swept up by a vacuum sweep, or street cleaning equipment, then we're solving some of that issue.”

[16:06] “We want this to be a premium solution. But at the same time, […] we'd be foolish to want to compete with the cement or the concrete industry, what we want to do is partner with the industry. And what we know is we have a technology that they don't currently have. And so what's been really painstaking, but I think very worthwhile in our pilot manufacturing and the current stage that we're at, is getting the process and the technology to the point where it can just be a turnkey solution for existing manufacturers. […] The industry right now [is] trying to decarbonize. […] I don't think they have great solutions. I'd like to think that we do.”

Rating: 💧💧💧💧

🎙️ Full Episode: Apple | Spotify
🕰️ 41 min | 🗓️ 01/04/2022
✅ Time saved: 39 min

Additional Links:
StartEngine: AquiPor