Podcast Episode 88

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A Road Trip to Resiliency: What’s Buried Beneath

A Road Trip to Resiliency: What’s Buried Beneath

Episode 88 | 29 min

With Guests:

Harris Duininck, College Sophomore of Texas A&M, College Station, TX
Griffin Duininck, College Senior of Grand Canyon University, Phoenix, AZ

Jamie has some special guests joining him on this episode of The Water Table Podcast. College students Harris and Griffin Duininck sit down to talk about their summer job– a road trip to find out about resiliency in the water management industry. The guys were all over the map and learned some valuable lessons about why their generation should care about plastic pipe and what it might mean for the future, in agriculture and beyond.

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Every place we went, it seemed like the main focus was on resiliency– young people our age don’t understand that. Because if you just saw plastic pipe going in, you wouldn’t understand why they’re doing it... it’s all to create a more sustainable future.

— Griffin Duininck

Guest Bios

Harris Duininck

Harris Duininck is a sophomore majoring in Economics at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas. Harris plans to travel, go to grad school or enter the business world after graduation. Seeing Prinsco’s impact in arid climates was a highlight of his trip – right up there with the 10 miles he says Griffin drove all summer.

Griffin Duininck

Griffin Duininck is a senior in Business Management at Grand Canyon University in Phoenix, Arizona. After graduation, he plans to caddy for a summer in Vail, Colorado before embarking on his business career. He enjoyed expanding his knowledge of Prinsco this past summer and getting to know his cousin better along the way. And while the best part of the trip was the education, he also had fun sneaking into an unnamed football stadium to get a look at their field…to see if the water was being managed properly, of course.

Jamie Duininck (00:02):
This is the Water Table.

Speaker (00:05):
A chance to hear the agricultural side of these issues.

Jamie Duininck (00:09):
Place for people to go find information and education.

Speaker (00:13):
Water management is just going to become even more critical into the future.

Jamie Duininck (00:17):
How misunderstood what we do is.
Speaker (00:22):I would encourage people to open their minds and listen to this dialogue.

Jamie Duininck (00:30):
Welcome back to the Water Table podcast. Today I have a couple of fun guests and exciting for me to be able to have these two with me. I have my son, Harris Duininck and his cousin Griffin. They have been doing some fun stuff this summer for Prinsco, and I want to talk about that. They have been traveling since early June around the country, looking at different projects, different projects in which plastic pipe is used in different applications. And we are naming this series, the Road Trip to Resiliency, in which they’re just learning and understanding why plastic pipe, why use this product in this application, things like that. And had a lot of fun from what I’ve heard and a lot of different experiences. So welcome to the podcast, guys.

Griffin Duininck (01:24):
Yeah, thanks for having us.

Harris Duininck (01:25):
Thanks for having us. We’re pretty excited for our first time on the Water Table.

Jamie Duininck (01:29):
Yeah, well, it’s dynamic, so welcome. So let’s start just by you guys I think did six or seven different trips through the week long, usually trips to a lot of different locations. But Griff, why don’t you tell me a little bit about, just a little bit of a snippet of the places you went geography wise.

Griffin Duininck (01:51):
So we drove out to Chicago, and then from there we went to Columbus and then back through to Minnesota, so that was the first week. And then second week we went through Omaha down to Kansas City and then up through Ames, Iowa at Iowa State. And then the week after that, we went to Minneapolis for a couple of days and spent some time in that suburban area there and then up to Duluth from there. And then we went to Salt Lake City, Utah and flew down to Arizona and Phoenix and then made it back. And the last trip we went on was…

Harris Duininck (02:32):
North Dakota.

Griffin Duininck (02:33):
Yeah. Up to North Dakota, Devils Lake and Fargo.

Jamie Duininck (02:36):
So the plan was that you were going to do all driving, but we did let you fly out west, so it didn’t make you drive all the way out there. So why don’t each of you just give me a little idea of something interesting that stuck out to you on the trip about plastic pipe that maybe you learned that you didn’t know?

Harris Duininck (02:56):
Yeah, I think we learned a lot about plastics. I think I really enjoyed our time in Duluth with Dr. Plummer. We learned a lot about recycled plastics, and I think for our age, recyclability is misunderstood and people think that plastics are just all bad and they see all this negative on the news and articles on social media about negatives of plastics, but there really is such a thing as a good plastic. And what Prinsco is doing and the industry is doing is really putting good plastics into the ground and they’re being used for a really good thing to mitigate damages from water.

Jamie Duininck (03:41):
Yeah, it’s interesting to stay there a minute when you take different plastics that are used and need to be used in different applications, whether it’s milk jugs or detergent bottles, whatever it might be, and you can take those and reuse them for a different application, which ends up being plastic pipe for the infrastructure of our rural communities, our cities, our suburbs, and where it can work every day like today we’re on this podcast, it’s raining outside right now, and that plastic pipe is working in its second life. It was something else, now it’s pipe and it’ll work for a 100 years. And so I’ve heard that before that it connects to your generation on a different level than it does to my generation. So I think that’s pretty neat that you guys were able to experience that from somebody like Dr. Plummer who is an expert in the industry of materials.

Griffin Duininck (04:41):
I’d say for me it was just learning a lot about just the storm chambers. I didn’t know a whole lot about it going into it. And I mean, I’d seen them before, but then seeing them being put together in the ground and just the whole process behind that and hearing the pros and cons of whether that’s the irrigation pond saving land, and just being able to put the water somewhere. I mean, it’s raining out today, but just knowing that it’s all underneath the parking lot, it was pretty cool to see. So I didn’t know a whole lot about that before then.

Jamie Duininck (05:13):
And do you guys… That’s interesting, we’ll talk about that in the applications in a minute, but just spurred another question, but because of the road trip, does it feel like different things you do now in your life, you look at it from a different perspective like when you drive into a Walmart or Target and you think, “Huh, I wonder what’s underneath this parking lot?” Does that happen or…?

Griffin Duininck (05:36):
Yeah, definitely, and just even talking with friends or anything, we got people our generation, they’re like, if they were driving, we see some pipe, they’re just talk about it, whatever it’s getting put in somewhere, and I’ll just be able to actually teach them a little bit compared to what I knew before and show them why it’s important.

Jamie Duininck (05:36):
Yeah. Good.

Harris Duininck (05:55):
Yeah, I think the importance of the systems really is exciting because it’s all underground. It’s something that it’s not seen to the public. And Griff and I growing up as your son, I knew that plastic water management was important, but you don’t see it unless if you’re on the job, you don’t see where it’s at, and it’s got a really big impact on the residential building or on the farm site or on the home site and the septic area. So that’s pretty cool to see when you’re onsite physically.

Jamie Duininck (06:24):
Yeah. And I think when you say that you don’t see it, that’s one of the things in the tagline of our Water Table podcast here is just this industry is so misunderstood and it’s misunderstood because you don’t see it, because they don’t see it, they can’t ask questions and they can’t try to put it together of how that works, why it works with conveying, storing, treating water. So yeah, I’m glad you mentioned that because that is a really interesting, when you look at it on the agricultural side, and we’ll talk about that too as all as people see is when they know, oh, there’s a job going in as they see big rolls of pipe out in the field as they’re driving by, but then they don’t see it again and it’s in the ground and what it’s doing to positively impact that agricultural field to grow a better crop, but also actually store some water in the soil profile.

(07:20):
There’s so many things going on there. So let’s back up though and talk about what you guys did as far as what other applications did you see? We talked a little bit about storm chambers, that was some of the things you saw on I think several jobs, but what other markets did you see?

Harris Duininck (07:40):
Well, we went to an agricultural job in North Dakota. We saw that Ellingsons were putting in big main while we were there. That day, it was a full section of prevent plant ground that was going in. And it didn’t get planted this year because it flooded in the spring.

Jamie Duininck (07:58):
And that was, I think you saw flexible dual wall being installed there.

Harris Duininck (08:03):
Yep. Flexible dual wall was going in the day we were there.

Jamie Duininck (08:07):
Our Goldflex is what Prinsco calls that, but yeah, good. What else did you see Griff?

Griffin Duininck (08:12):
Yeah, when we were in Chicago, we saw the golf course, Medinah golf course, which was five major championships played there, pretty big golf job and just seeing how different, it’s a little bit, I mean, similar to kind of agriculture a little bit. I mean obviously it’s like a lot of dual wall there and they’re kind of gritting it out along the fairways and the greens and hearing about how different it is putting in the bunkers or in the greens and all that, and just seeing it go down to, there’s a big pond or swamp kind of there, and it was all kind of leading down to that. So it was cool to see a big project getting done there.

Jamie Duininck (08:53):
Yeah. Yep, I think you also were in a couple different markets in Columbus. You went to Columbus, Ohio, what’d you look at there?

Harris Duininck (09:02):
We were with Hal Cassidy in Columbus. He sold the Proform job there. We went to this residential community and saw a basement being dug out and then they put the Proform in for the forms of the house, and it was pretty cool to see because that entire community was done with Proform, all the footings for every house in the community.

Jamie Duininck (09:22):
And Proform is another product, a neat product, that’s basically like a hollow, a plastic two by six that you can form your footings for the house by putting them in place rather than wood forms. And then just leave them in place, pour the concrete and leave them in place and use it as your drainage to keep the foundation of your house dry. So again, there is some sustainability and it’s using recycled plastic and then some sustainability there too of not using the same product for two different applications.

Harris Duininck (09:59):
The contractor said it saves them a full day’s work because the drainage and the form is in one product itself. So that’s pretty cool to save time and money for the contractors too.

Jamie Duininck (10:10):
Good. And I think you were on just some pipe jobs too, just in the stormwater side, is that right? Or was it all chambers? Did you see any pipe being installed anywhere?

Harris Duininck (10:21):
Yeah, we saw a water detention system with big 48 inch dual wall in Minneapolis at a new apartment complex.

Jamie Duininck (10:31):
Yeah. Good. And then the last thing you did that was different was, Griffin, in North Dakota you also were able to see a Pro4.

Griffin Duininck (10:40):
Yeah, Pro4-

Jamie Duininck (10:41):
Which is our onsite septic product.

Griffin Duininck (10:44):
Yeah. So that was pretty much the easiest way to say it was just smaller chambers and water’s able to enter in through them. And I mean, they were putting in a couple rows of them and just talking to the contractors and how good, I mean, they were saying that they’re better than what they’ve been using before for that. And they’re just such an easy install for them and watch them do it. I mean, we were there for an hour and they were already done with all of it.

Jamie Duininck (11:09):
Sure. And that’s a leaching system away from a septic tank, and we’re excited about that product and what that can do at Prinsco. Talk a little bit about what you guys, when it comes to the theme of this summer was the Road Trip to Resiliency. And you’ve talked a little bit about that already in different ways without using that term, but how do you see differently than you did before not knowing very much on how plastic pipe is resilient?

Harris Duininck (11:42):
I think resiliency for us has really come down. We’ve thought about it personally a little bit, what’s resiliency to us, and we’ve seen that through the plastic pipe this year and we’ve seen that plastic pipe is resilient for big storms, it’s resilient for shift in the earth, in earthquakes, it’s more resilient in the way that it’s being able to install. It’s way easier than concrete pipe or steel pipe, it’s much lighter. You can store it much easier on site, you don’t need as much space, because a lot of it can be coiled or it can be stacked and some of the other products can’t be stacked. But I think we’ve just seen that resiliency in plastic pipe is it’s able to thrive in the face of adversity, whatever it’s given a big storm shift in the ground, lots of heat, lots of pressure, lots of weight, it’s able to bounce back better than other products and really have a lifetime, like Dr. Plummer said of a 100 plus years.

Griffin Duininck (12:44):
And I don’t know if this would go under resilient, but just hearing about the fabrication of custom fittings, I mean, just that you guys are able to do that and weld those pieces together was pretty cool to learn about this year too.

Jamie Duininck (12:56):
Yeah, I think where that goes is the joining system of plastic pipe is far superior to that of concrete pipe or CMP, Corrugated Metal Pipe. And that’s really because, so that would be true too in the fabricated side, but the joining system of Bell and Spigot with a gasket and the tests that we can meet, whether it’s just a lab test or an inground air test, are far superior to that of our competitors. So that’s one place where I think you can say, it is also resilient that I hadn’t really thought you guys would come up with that, so I’m glad you did mention that, because it is one area I think we can outperform the other industry options.

(13:52):
So want to talk a little bit about your trip up to North Dakota and the agriculture side. Usually the Water Table podcast is focused on our agriculture, how plastic pipe is used in an agricultural setting. Did you guys have come out of that with a different perspective? I know Harris, you’ve been on some agricultural jobs with me over the time. Griff, you, not so much, but did you have a different perspective on our US agriculture and when it comes to a large project like that, what that does for the landscape?

Griffin Duininck (14:32):
For me, what I took most out of it is just hearing about how it used to be a giant lake up there and that the soil is pretty not great from what I heard from them. And just hearing how if this wasn’t getting done that it would just be inconsistent the amount of years that they’d be able to plan out there. So yeah, they’re spending a lot of money on the system, but I mean their yields will be a lot higher throughout the next couple of years. And over the long term, it’ll eventually make more money for them compared to.

Jamie Duininck (15:06):
Yeah. And just for our listeners on that is where they were in North Dakota, the geography was really the old Lake Agassiz, lake bed that was during the glacier times, and the soils changed so rapidly because of that, because that was an old lake bed centuries ago. And so what happens then is you get really inconsistency. You get areas of the Red River Valley that just hold water in the soil profile, water moves way beyond my ability to explain, but water can move throughout that soil profile and managing your water with subsurface water system like what you guys saw, just changes everything from the standpoint of availability of that soil. And then when you’re up north, a week can make a huge difference. If you can get in and plant a week earlier or harvest at the right time, that crop will grow and mature at a quicker rate.

(16:09):
So that’s what it’s all about. And you explain that well, what you saw. And I think when you look at it, what really interests and I think gives us passion at Prinsco around that is the ability to grow a better crop in a place that they’ve been growing crops. It’s not like they drained a wetland there, they didn’t do that. That field has had crops on it every year, but they sometimes don’t turn out that well. So to grow a better crop, which then feeds more people, which also then the farmer makes more money and it just creates a much better economy. I’ve stated that so many times on the podcast around when a farmer makes more money, he pays more taxes. When he pays more taxes in rural America, that goes to more roads and schools and hospitals in the area, and they can donate money to their churches. And if a farmer’s making money in rural America, the community is thriving. And that’s really important to who we are as a country.

Harris Duininck (17:11):
I think what I learned is that water can be destructive. Ellingsons were talking about the Fargo diversion and they’re pumping billions of dollars to divert the river around the city because it’s destroyed so many things up there. We also really realized that water’s essential to life up there. That’s kind of part of a massive agricultural area for America. It feeds a lot of the world, like you said. So for Prinsco to be able to put in pipe, to really walk that line of we’re taking this water that’s essential for life and we’re making it less destructive for the area and using it to grow a proper crop is really exciting and cool. And I think that’s what we saw them doing and learned a lot about.

Jamie Duininck (17:56):
Yeah, well, the apple didn’t fall far from the tree when we’re talking about the Fargo diversion in a negative way. So the opportunity that North Dakota and Minnesota missed with really understanding what agricultural drainage does and not applying a billion dollars instead of 4 billion to the diversion, taking a billion of that and just tiling everything south of Fargo throughout the valley would’ve solved their problems and they chose to go a different route. So that’s done, that diversion will be done in the next few years. So that’s not going to happen, but it would’ve been really interesting to prove that out to be that way. So one of the things you guys were able to do kind of early on in this was head down to Kansas City and interview Dan Kerns from Plastic Pipe Institute. Dan’s the director of engineering for the drainage division and kind of wanted to start there to get some knowledge around how PPI is thinking about things, how they’re promoting themselves. And so tell me a little bit about that, your conversations with Dan.

Harris Duininck (19:09):
Yeah, we really enjoyed our conversation with Dan. He kind of was the one that started us to think that there’s good and bad plastics. He showed us a little video to start that PPI made showing that when you recycle a bottle, it could end up in the basement of your house or in a farm field or everywhere where recycle plastic goes. I don’t think people really think about that, they just kind of put it in the recycling bin.

Jamie Duininck (19:37):
What you’re saying when you recycle, it could end up in pipe?

Harris Duininck (19:40):
Yeah, in plastic pipe under the ground. And he really made it clear that this pipe is resilient, like we’ve said many times, and this pipe lasts for a 100 years. So to be able to take that plastic detergent bottle or whatever it is, grind it up and put it in a pipe that’s used for a 100 years is much more sustainable than taking it and putting it back into another piece of plastic that it’s just a one-time use plastic, or it’s a plastic that has to be recycled again and again and again because at some point it’s not worth anything and it can’t be recycled, or it’ll more than likely just end up in a lake, a river, a stream in the Gulf of Mexico, wherever it’s going to end up, not locked up in the ground for a 100 years doing something to help society.

Jamie Duininck (20:30):
Right.

Griffin Duininck (20:30):
And just hearing about all the different, because you used to work for another different company before and just hearing all the knowledge on that. And my biggest takeaway was to that video he showed us, and it was meant for maybe guys like us, not like us, but guys our age maybe that don’t know a ton about it. I feel like what PPI is doing is just trying to get the common person to understand a lot more about plastic pipe in an easier way. Just getting the word out there is what it seemed like to me.

Jamie Duininck (21:01):
So guys, one thing I’m thinking about and been thinking about since I’ve known where you’ve been each week, but you’ve interviewed some prominent people in our industry with Dan Kerns from PPI and Dr. Matt Helmers at Iowa State, Dr. Michael Plummer up at University of Minnesota, Duluth, kind of all on different perspectives. Dan kind of global perspective on drainage and our industry. Dr. Helmers really on the agricultural side, which was probably a little bit out of your comfort zones at the time, it was pretty early on in the summer. And then Dr. Plummer on materials and plastic materials. And the question I think that I’d like to just pose you guys right now is why should young people your ages care about this stuff? And what did you learn from those conversations and from some of the job sites, but really those conversations I think is where that made you think a lot. So why should young people care about plastic pipe, care about this industry?

Harris Duininck (22:03):
I think there’s really two things. First one that the industry is really dynamic and exciting right now, but more importantly, the products that the industry provides are used to create a sustainable society for an evolving future. We really examined that storms are getting larger and storms are dropping more water in a faster rate of time, and how can that water be managed and collected and conveyed like the products do? And I think we really saw that in Phoenix. Doug told us, the guy we interviewed, it hadn’t rained there in a 100 days, and they’re putting in a multimillion dollar system to collect and convey water. And they’re doing that for a reason. They aren’t doing that because it doesn’t rain there. They’re doing that because when it does rain, it rains a lot and that water can damage a lot. So I think it’s just pretty, it’s an exciting industry and they’re doing really good things to sustain our society that’s really growing and mitigate damages from water.

Griffin Duininck (23:08):
Yeah, I feel like every place that we went to, it seemed like it was the main focus was on for the future. And a lot of people, young guys our age don’t understand that if you just saw a plastic pipe going in, you wouldn’t really fully understand why they’re doing it. And it’s mostly because of just whether it’s creating more land space in a commercial detention system or on an agricultural job, putting in that system to produce more yields is just all for the future and spending the money right now so it can be more sustainable for the future. It was really interesting to hear and just hearing how much it’s growing and just all the different products obviously you guys have come out with throughout the years. I mean, this industry’s growing and it’s something that I think guys getting out of college our age should be interested in getting into.

Jamie Duininck (23:59):
Yeah, it’s interesting and exciting for me to see you guys catch some of that vision and understand that and see that it’s growing in the different products, not only the different products, but it’s not like it’s a super high-tech industry, but there is new things coming to market all the time, which is exciting, not only maybe the same application, but a different product for that application, so that’s exciting. And then, Harris, what you said too around the storms are getting bigger and more rainfall, and that’s just a fact, you can’t really argue that, that we’re getting more three inch rains or more five inch rains than we’ve had before. And engineers design things for a 100-year floods and 500-year floods and 1000-year floods. Well, when a 500-year flood is happening every 40 years now instead of every 500 years, they have to design things different.

(24:58):
And we just so happen our industry to have products that can help them do that. So I think it’s a place where you guys and your age group should look at as a real possibility to be involved with for career. What we did this summer by having you guys do this, I’m really grateful that you were both able to do that and proud of you both, that you took this seriously and really enjoyed it. I mean, I think it became where as the summer went along, it gained a lot of momentum around understanding and then getting excited about being able to go to the next place because you knew you were going to see something different than you did and learn from that too. So I’m proud of you guys for doing that.

(25:44):
And I think that from my perspective, I’m really excited about the opportunity we have to release this series, which we’re going to do in a six or seven part series on what you guys did this summer and see how this can positively impact our customers, the stakeholders within the industry, the engineers, engineers seem to have for years and years and years been marketed to… That our industry is marketed to engineers in just one certain way. So to do this differently and have something on social media that’s going to probably be a little bit funny at times, going to show just your world for six, eight weeks and what happened in that world that relates to that engineering group and why they should spec plastic pipe rather than the alternative. I think it’s going to be exciting. It’s something new and different, and so I’m happy you guys were willing participants in that.

Harris Duininck (26:48):
Yeah, I think that’s really what made the summer exciting was new and different. Like you said, there’s so many applications that Prinsco products are used in, and we really saw new and different every day. I think Griff and I said not one day was really the same, and they could have been using the same product two days in a row, but it was every time used for a different application that the engineer spec, like you said, which is pretty interesting to go to the job and say what’s exactly going on here and for it to be different every time.

Griffin Duininck (27:19):
And especially the people we’re meeting too, whether it was like a professor like Dr. Helmers or Plummer or just salesmen and just hearing everyone’s different opinions and just taking little bits and pieces from each of those kinds of people, definitely learned a lot over the road trip from that as well.

Jamie Duininck (27:38):
How do you expand on this next summer?

Griffin Duininck (27:42):
I don’t know.

Jamie Duininck (27:42):
You haven’t thought about that yet? All right. Well, good. Well, guys, thanks so much for joining me today on the Water Table. It’s been fun to have family and familiar faces as someone to interview, and glad that you were able to learn a lot and provide value to our industry, not only to Prinsco for sure, but also our industry. I think this series and what we’re going to do is going to have an impact, so thank you for that.

Harris Duininck (28:09):
Thank you.

Griffin Duininck (28:09):
Yeah, thanks for having us on.

Jamie Duininck (28:14):
Well, thanks for listening to this episode. I have so much fun recording these. I hope you have as much fun listening as I do recording. These episodes are available on all major podcast platforms as well as YouTube, so find them and download them when you can. Thanks for joining us.