60 Business View - August 2015
MANUFACTURING
that provides clean drinking water for Pateung’s 500
villagers. The company also donated 45,600 feet of
PVC pipe to construct an 8.5 mile pipeline that brings
fresh mountain spring water to the 5,000 people who
live in the village of Santa Cruz, Honduras.
But Gordon sees an amalgamation of commercial and
altruistic pursuits closer to home, when he explains
how the expanded use of JM Eagle products can also
help make America stronger. “Our nation’s infrastruc-
ture is crumbling,” he says. “Recently, the American
Society of Civil Engineering took a look at the nation’s
infrastructure and gave it a grade of D+. Most of it was
built in the mid 1900s, and the ductile iron pipe that
was used has corroded. There are water main breaks
every day on Main Streets across the country, and
we’re losing trillions of gallons of water annually be-
cause of corroded pipes. Ductile iron corrodes. Plas-
tic pipe, on the other hand, is proven to last in excess
of a hundred years; it does not corrode. It’s the right
product for our infrastructure, today. For water infra-
structure, the best material is plastic pipe. So, we are
doing what’s right for the country in providing a build-
ing element that protects our most precious, natural
resource.”
Two U.S. cities that recently replaced some of their
corroded ductile iron pipelines with JM Eagle’s newer
technologies are Tampa, Florida and Celina, Ohio. In
Tampa, corrosive, aggressive soil had eaten through
960 feet of a 35-year old ductile iron pipe, and in Ce-
lina, 10 city and five commercial water projects utilized
the company’s patented, Ultra Blue PVCO, a molecu-
larly oriented polyvinyl chloride pressure pipe that is
extremely tough and durable. “If you put a machine on
top of it, it wouldn’t break,” says Gordon. “And we’re
the only manufacturer for that item in the U.S.”
