Geotextiles Directory

Four Jobs in the Ground

Separation is the simplest job: a nonwoven laid between a road's stone base and the soft soil beneath stops the two mixing under traffic, so the base keeps its thickness and strength. Filtration adds a rule — the fabric must pass water while holding soil particles, which sets its pore size against the soil's grading. Drainage uses thick, transmissive webs to carry water within their plane to an outlet, and protection uses heavy needlepunched felts to cushion waterproof membranes from puncture by sharp stone.

Most nonwoven geotextiles are needlepunched polypropylene or polyester, chosen because the needled structure gives the combination civil work needs: high elongation to survive installation damage, a three-dimensional pore structure for filtration, and chemical indifference to soil. Woven geotextiles — listed here alongside, since projects buy both — take the reinforcement jobs where tensile strength at low stretch is the point.

The Makers Listed Here

ABG Geosynthetics (United Kingdom) is listed for woven and nonwoven fabrics, products and composite structures for erosion control, drainage and reinforcement in construction and civil engineering; ABG, Ltd (United Kingdom) for geocomposite drainage and gas-venting layers, erosion control products and woven and nonwoven geotextiles for landfill, tunnels, highways and green roofs; ACE Geosynthetics Enterprise Co., Ltd (Taiwan) appears for woven geogrids from high-strength yarns. The list continues through producers and stockists on several continents.

Each listing keeps its original country and description. The composite entries — drainage cores sandwiched between filter fabrics, clay liners carried on geotextiles — show where the market has moved: engineers increasingly buy a function (a drainage layer, a containment system) rather than a fabric, and the makers below describe their offers in exactly those terms.

Specifying a Geotextile

Specify against the soil and the job, not by weight alone: the governing properties are tensile strength and elongation, puncture resistance (the CBR test is the usual shorthand), pore size relative to the soil, and permeability. Installation survivability is the silent specification — a fabric perfect in the laboratory fails if site stone and plant tear it during laying, so heavier, tougher grades are often chosen for rough ground regardless of the calculated minimum.

Ask suppliers for the test certificates behind the datasheet values and for the product's record in the same application and soil type. The producers and distributors below cover the main families; the needlepunch directory covers the felting technology behind most nonwoven geotextiles, and the composites directory covers the geocomposite structures that combine them with cores and membranes.

Installation: Where Geotextiles Succeed or Fail

More geotextile failures are installed than manufactured. Rolls stored unwrapped in sunlight lose strength before they are laid; overlaps skimped below the specified width open under the first load; sharp stone dropped from height punctures fabric that careful placement would have spared. Good practice is unglamorous: store rolls wrapped and shaded, unroll without dragging, overlap or sew to the drawing, and cover within the exposure limit the maker states for the polymer.

Design life raises the stakes. A road separator may be asked for twenty years, a landfill protection felt for the facility's licensed life and beyond, and the polymers oblige — buried, dark and cool, polypropylene and polyester geotextiles degrade very slowly — provided installation did not wound them first. The suppliers below publish installation guidance with their products; engineers should hold contractors to it, and the modest cost difference between grades is rarely the place to save money on a buried product that cannot be inspected later.

Geotextile Makers Listed Here

85 companies and organisations are listed in this directory, carried from the original Apparel Search listing with each company's country and description as originally stated. Follow a name to the company's own website.