Stratford Business Expanding Asphalt Alternative Across Canada

Stratford’s Stormflow Surfacing is looking forward to installing its water-permeable surfacing product in commercial parking lots across the country after a three-year pilot project with the University of Waterloo ends this summer.

A Stratford startup company’s eco-friendly surfacing technology could soon be replacing asphalt pavement in commercial parking lots across Canada.

Stormflow Surfacing’s asphalt replacement is made from recycled truck tires, granite and a polyurethane binder. Unlike asphalt, the porous nature of this surfacing product allows rain water to run through to the base and subsoil instead of into municipal storm-sewer systems.

According to an article published by the University of Waterloo last fall, one square foot of Stormflow’s surfacing product can absorb 5,800 gallons of water per hour, while every 1,000 square feet of the product saves roughly 300 tires from landfill.

While this product has been around for a while and is applied more widely in the U.S., Stormflow Surfacing owners and Stratford residents Jim Roth and Julie Redfern-Roth have been limited to applying their product to residential driveways, playgrounds, walkways and a handful of other smaller projects, including the pads underneath Stratford’s al fresco outdoor dining tables on Tom Patterson Island.

“We’ve been officially in business for five years,” Redfern-Roth said. “We’d sort of been playing around with it for a couple years before that. This is the eighth year that our driveway has been in, and we have a firepit in our backyard with a little walkway. And gosh, we’ve done maybe 25 driveways (locally).”

Near the end of a three-year pilot project in Wellesley Township with the University of Waterloo’s Centre for Pavement and Transportation Technology, the couple said researchers have been testing how the Stormflow product withstands heavier vehicular traffic in an environment simulating a commercial parking lot. The tests also gauge how the product stands up to weathering, where in a parking lot it can be applied effectively, and how it can link up with an asphalt roadway. Click to read the entire article

‍

‍Learn more about the research being done by Stormflow Surfacing

‍