Concrete, from now on also a blessing for rain

Few building materials are as widespread as concrete. Concrete is all around us in buildings, pavements and paving. However, it is often fingered as being impervious, thus bad for stormwater infiltration. Another consideration was that every square meter of concrete was one less square meter of green space. This was more than enough reason for Philippe Segers, CEO of Eurodal, to start looking for new, sustainable solutions with concrete. Dealing intelligently with water, greenery, paving and space was the common thread here.

From problems to new opportunities

Together with several external companies and research institutes, Eurodal, manufacturer of concrete slabs and floor plates, created the B'RAIN partnership. They sought, and found, a completely sustainable application of concrete that fits perfectly within the caring treatment of water, greenery, space and paving. More than that, concrete can now actively contribute to the collection, infiltration and reuse of rainwater and to more and better greenery in cities. Thus old problems were transformed into new opportunities.

Innovative applications

The partners of the B'RAIN partnership, in particular Eurodal, Beton De Bonte and Tree Builders joined forces to devise a new, sustainable and future-oriented system in which concrete plays the leading role, and in which, as separate, individual companies, they could not immediately provide a comprehensive answer.

The system itself is based on a three-layer, vertical zoning that consists of the concrete pavement itself, cutouts in the pavement for trees and plantings and space under the concrete for water.

A concrete application of this, Vélonet, allows existing canals or newly dug trenches to be covered with concrete and a bicycle path to be built on them. Open channels are placed in the trenches with slugs into which rainwater can penetrate. The compartmentalization of communicating chambers allows application on slopes. Provisions for utility lines are also installed in the trenches. All this not only saves scarce space, it also avoids expensive and time-consuming expropriations.

Another application is found in the paving of large public surfaces such as city squares, parking lots or school playgrounds. Here too, the collection and drainage of rainwater can be provided, combined with recesses for greenery. Eurodal's "Hydrops 3.0" provides interconnected concrete chambers under the pavement where the water is stripped of silt and slowly released to the subsoil. Some of the treated water is released to trees and plantings.

Greener cities

Trees in the cityscape present another challenge. Compaction of the subsurface causes their roots to seek water and oxygen at the surface, often pushing up and damaging the surrounding pavement, which in turn leads to additional costs. The solution to this is to install tree bunkers in the concrete pavement.

They provide underground solid root ball anchoring, tree root guidance, irrigation facilities and deep aeration. This eliminates harmful root pressure and allows the trees to grow healthily in ideal conditions. In any case, this is as ingenious as it is simple an answer to global warming, which is putting increasing pressure on the health of urban trees. Our cities can only become greener as a result.

Eurodal presents these sustainable and future-oriented solutions in their own inspiration park with demo-zone in Grobbendonk.