By Kim Briggerman
Missoulian
The idea surfaced in the early 1970s. When building a road, an innovative engineer reasoned, what would happen if you put fabric between the earth and the gravel grade to keep mud from seeping up?
“The original separator was nothing more than carpet backing,” Todd Anderson said. “Somebody looked at carpet backing and said, ‘I think if I incorporate this into a roadway, it might help.’ And it did.”
Anderson is vice president of sales and marketing for TenCate Geosynthetics, a multinational company based in Atlanta that combines textile technology with chemical process and material technology.
More than 40 years later, he said, those technologies have advanced to the point that geosynthetics made by dozens of companies are used extensively in Montana and around the nation.
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