My interview with our CEO, Mirco Pegoraro
by Luca Zausa, 27 July 2020
I interviewed our CEO, Mirco Pegoraro, who is also the inventor and product designer of all Geoplast products. We spoke about our latest product he designed and we have just launched – Aquabox.
Why did you decide to develop Aquabox?
Mirco Pegoraro: I am always looking for innovative ways to respond to financial and sustainability challenges in the construction industry. Globally, one of the greatest building risks today comes from water-related disasters. Frequent stormwater floods, old rainwater drainage systems in cities, and lack of access to water supply in households are the main causes. The major goal of my design is to update sustainability and resilience in our lives. I felt it was time to provide the homeowners with a modern solution.
What key points guided you during the development of Aquabox?
Mirco Pegoraro: Two technical points were my guidelines in the design process.
The first point was high storage efficiency. The best materials for drainage in nature are gravel and crushed stone. My goal was to design a product that can hold a much larger amount of water in comparison with natural solutions. The result is that Aquabox has more than 300% higher efficiency than gravel. To be precise, the storage volume is 96% compared to 30% for gravel or crushed stone.
An equally important key point was load capacity. I wanted to make sure that Aquabox could adapt to various basin shapes while maintaining a high load capacity. Urban centers are increasingly congested, so the product has to maintain all its qualities in green areas, paved areas, and in high load-bearing transport zones. For this reason, we must be able to guarantee stable and solid construction.
Why would someone choose Aquabox?
Mirco Pegoraro: Water management solutions like Aquabox are lowering costs and protect the property from water damage. Aquabox is now the newest product on the market, and applies all the latest design and technology advancements. This makes it highly competitive.
There are three main technical benefits:
- 96% void volume provides high storage efficiency;
- High load-bearing capacity even in intensely urbanized areas;
- Inspectability – you can inspect the conditions of the basin anytime during its life cycle.
In your opinion, what is the current trend in the construction industry?
Mirco Pegoraro: The construction industry is highly focused on two big trends: profitability and sustainability.
Profitability means increasing profits both for builders and real estate owners. It includes lowering costs, increasing the selling value, reducing energy use, improving resilience, and many other aspects. This is a very pragmatic trend that provides builders and owners with immediate benefit.
On the other hand, sustainability is a long term goal which is gaining more and more importance in the construction industry, and can not be ignored. There is a great fear that current real estate and infrastructure projects will lose value in the long term due to poor implementation of sustainability principles.
I see these two trends as a single trend. Making a house that is sustainable is also profitable. In Geoplast we worked on hundreds, if not thousands of projects, and over and over again it is proven that sustainable costs less and makes more money. For example, lighter formworks do not need machines; less concrete means less building time, more green means less energy expenses, more water resilience means less damage, etc.
This is why we combined the two trends into a single one: sustainable profitability. Our goal, as a company, is to design and manufacture construction products which satisfy both of these big trends.
