About Basalt World Corp
Basalt World Corp was founded by President Elina Jenkins in 2018, but the companies story really began in 1988 with Don Smith's discovery of continuous Basalt fiber and the many advantages it had to offer over steel and the man-made recipe for fiberglass. This eventually lead to the thought that BFRP (Basalt Fiber Reinforced Polymers) could and should be used to reinforce concrete. To test this theory Don would need a way to efficiently produce BFRP composite rebar. Don's discovery of a new way to pultrude glass-state basalt fiber without the use of any heated dies was groundbreaking, and put Don on the path to creating the first ever pultrusion machine specifically designed to run BFRP.
Over the next 20 years Don continued to further his career in the boat building and marine construction industries, but didn't allow those businesses to get in the way of him developing the first prototype pultrusion machine designed to run Basalt fiber. With the first machine complete and pumping out BFRP composite rebar, Don now needed a way to optimize its efficiency and a way to successfully replicate it. This lead to him teaming up with close friend Elina Jenkins, a computer aided design professional who moved to the United States from Latvia in 1994. Since 2008 the team of two have been working together to morph the original prototype machine into what we now call the Lean Green FRP Rebar Machine ® .
Our mission is to become the driving force in growing the FRP industry, pushing to align our innovative technology with the public good while we make Basalt Fiber Reinforced Polymers the standard reinforcement for concrete. This would ultimately help us to save taxpayers billions of dollars a year while also lowering the carbon footprint left behind to build and reinforce our concrete infrastructure. Our technology will help to maintain an exceptionally high quality control standard throughout the entire FRP industry. Basalt is the stepping stone to a greener, sustainable future; and the sales of our Lean Green FRP Rebar Machine ® will help the industry keep up with the amount of composite rebar that will need to be produced!
The FRP Reinforcement Industry
THE PROBLEM
Today we live in a steel reinforced concrete world. We didn't know it at the time but our concrete structures like bridges, roadways, seawalls and dams all have a useful life span of roughly 35 years before they're in need of serious repairs or replacement. Extreme weather conditions such as fires, rising sea levels and flooding all contribute to the cracking of concrete.
Black steel rebar is used to reinforce the brittle nature of concrete. Due to concretes porous nature water gets inside causing the steel to rust, when this happens the rebar doubles in size eventually cracking concrete structures. American infrastructure was recently given a D+ rating by the American Society of Civil Engineers. the same failing grade awarded to the country back in its 2013 report card. The nation’s association of Civil Engineers quoted that “The nation’s roads, dams, airports, water and electrical systems need $4.6 trillion of work”.
THE SOLUTION
Traditional black steel rebar needs to be replaced with NON-CORROSIVE Basalt Fiber Reinforced Polymer composite rebar. When BFRP composite rebar is placed inside of a concrete structure to be used as tensile reinforcement, the Basalt composite rebar is 2.5 times STRONGER than steel while weighing just 1/4th the weight! Most importantly because fiber reinforced polymers aren't steel BFRP composite rebar can NEVER RUST!
