And Then It Was Time FOR POZZOTIVE®

O&G Industries, ON THE GO | October 1, 2020

Louis Grasso is a methodical and unstoppable man, a solid, steady force that cannot be knocked off course. His course is bringing to market on a grand scale a product he and his business partner, Patrick Grasso, have called Pozzotive. It’s an additive for concrete, in a class of compounds called pozzolans, that Louis Grasso began developing twenty years ago. With a production plant approaching startup in space leased inside O&G’s Beacon Falls Fabrication Center, Pozzotive is poised to get noticed.

It was 2000 when Louis set up a meeting in Manhattan with world-renowned architect Bob Fox, Jr., perhaps best known for his LEED Platinum, 2.1million-square-foot Bank of America Tower and his role as the founding chairman of the Urban Green Council in New York. What Grasso intended to be a show-andtell about the architectural blocks his company could provide turned into a charge from Fox: “He said to me, ‘Louis, go back and find a way to make your products sustainable and green and add recycled content. Better yet, add regional post-consumer recycled content.’ That was how this all started.”

Louis Grasso, engineer, inventor and principal at Urban Mining Northeast, has worked closely with O&G’s Bill Stanley, Materials Division VP, for the past eleven years. Grasso and Stanley are repositories of everything, and maybe more, about concrete, from its many compositions to its many applications. Theirs is the continuation of a relationship that began nearly 20 years ago with the late Bob Oneglia. Grasso’s concrete block company sold blocks to O&G, and the Grasso’s construction company bought concrete from O&G for building projects. Grasso told Oneglia about his novel pozzolan recipe, how it would make a sustainable concrete with very high performance and be a “green building material,” the new wave coming in construction. Grasso is still fond of recounting how Bob Oneglia called Pozzotive one of the most exciting new products he had seen in his 40 years in the construction industry. Continuing the long-standing relationship, O&G has become an early adapter and will be a major customer of Urban Mining Northeast.

By way of background to the Pozzotive story, a family of compounds called pozzolans can be added to concrete for various purposes. Pozzolans have been used for thousands of years – volcanic ash was an early pozzolan, a “supplementary cementitious material,” added to concrete by the ancient Romans to lessen the amount of cement needed to hold the ingredients together. The particular pozzolan chosen today is driven largely by the end application for the concrete: sidewalk recipes are different than bridge decks than interior floors, and so on. With Pozzotive, Grasso has not only added strength and imperviousness to chemicals that eat away at concrete, he’s solved a municipal recycling conundrum, cut the amount of energy needed to produce concrete, reduced CO2 emissions for that same process, and created a sustainable, green building product. These are heavyweight, industry-changing benefits.

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