Gordon Schneider's Earth Technology

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Does an innovative road builder hold the key to the building material of the future?

Take a close gander at the road pictured on this page. What do you see? Nothing but an ordinary country scene complete with trees and shrubbery, a powerline, and an average-looking (well, maybe slightly better than average) street . . . right?

Right, except for one thing. The innocent rural lane in that photo may provide some of the answers to our need for energy-efficient and ecologically sound construction. You see, that thoroughfare—Roosevelt Road in South Bend, Indiana—used to get so torn up by the harsh wear and tear of raining and freezing and thawing and freezing and thawing again that—every spring—the highway became completely impassable. School buses had to make a three-mile detour around the chuckholed road section, while patch upon patch of added asphalt cracked off ineffectively.

Yet that same road was reconstructed in 1969 ... using "soil stabilization" chemicals developed by a gentleman named Gordon L. Schneider. That was 10 years ago—and the St. Joseph County Highway Department hasn't spent a single maintenance dollar on Roosevelt Road since—but the byway still looks brand silver-dollar-shiny new!

USING WHAT'S THERE

Mr. Schneider has been building highways with his Earth Technology Systems for some 18 years, so the pictured stretch of perfect Indiana pavement is hardly a one-shot fluke. The construction chemist has been responsible for roads laid through a marshy bog in Florida, along heavily used turnpike routes in Tennessee, next to a frequently flooded national park campground in Missouri ... and in scores of other places across the United States. Every one of his projects has held up perfectly, and they've all cost less (10%, 38%, 75%—even as much as 600%—less!) than do roads made by people using the accepted building methods!

Most important, though, Gordon's highways are environmentally sound. His methods "stretch" and completely recycle old asphalt . . . so that the petrochemicals that would have gone into making each ton of the road covering can—instead—be made into 240 gallons of fuel oil! The construction procedures can also eliminate the need to import tons of "foundation" gravel . . . by solidifying the underlying soil into a base that's hard enough to withstand the entire weight of a heavily used thoroughfare. Moreover, Gordon's ecologically harmless "stabilizing" agents are derived from sulfonic acid byproducts of the oil industry . . . materials that are otherwise dumped as waste!