Plantable Retaining Walls and Regenerative Design with Mark Woolbright

I think what allures me so much about what you've built is how, you know, running a construction business, we're always thinking about how much is it going to cost to ship to get things to us when they're not just available at the local landscape supply shop?

Right.

How deep do we have to take the footing? What are we excavating? How are we moving soil on and off? How are we dealing with hydrostatic pressure and dealing with stormwater behind walls? And a concrete wall, whether it's poured or it's blocked, becomes a whole system that's way bigger than just that concrete wall, which is meant to be.

But I think about hydrostatic pressure, if we can just tune in on that.

Can you tell me a little bit about how, when your walls get at height, how you start to spec hydrostatic pressure in a different way with what you've developed instead of just a standard CMU block wall?

Well, our path to growth was always to call on engineering firms because at the time, the preponderance of retaining walls was on commercial applications.

And there'd be land planners, civil engineers that were designing a land plan for like a 200-home subdivision or an office park.

And so

they'd figure out where the grade changes were, and they would put like proposed retaining wall in there.

In the older days before us, it was either railroad ties, which were impermanent and had a replacement cost down the road, or it was a cast-in-place concrete wall, which cost quite a bit more because of the footings and everything else.

So a modular wall that was concrete was a real advantage.

So I would make all my pitches to the civil engineering firms.

not even the architects or the landscape architects and those guys or women too at the time would have a ton of questions for me and initially I didn't have answers for those questions so I had to go back and we had to do testing and we had to learn and we had to figure out how how does our system solve those problems how do we answer those questions And I was fortunate to be just given a gift by a lot of these older engineers that said, hey, let me tell you how we design a wall.

Let me show you what we're looking for.

Here's the calculations.

And this is what your system does really good.

And this is where there's a gap.

And we don't understand it.

And we don't know how to calculate that, you

know.

And so they really trained me.

I'm not an engineer.

You know, I'm kind of a scientist, inventor kind of guy, curious guy, problem solver.

And so they schooled me and we were able to develop presentations that answered their questions.

Like our wall system had setback.