Correct Building Products

A more durable deck

Portland Press Herald
August 7, 2002

BIDDEFORD, Maine — Ah, summer on the deck. Firing up the grill, sitting in the sun. Pulling out painful splinters, hammering in popped nails, sealing cracked boards.

Those last three activities are familiar to owners of decks made from pressure-treated lumber, by far the most popular decking material. As pressure-treated decks age and maintenance mounts, a cry has gone out in the suburbs: Give us a deck that doesn't warp and crack!

That is the promise of a new generation of composite decking materials, typically made from recycled sawdust and plastic. Composite decking is a relatively new product, and it sells for roughly twice the price of pressure-treated wood. So it's still gaining acceptance among builders and property owners. But the potential for growth appears big.

Here at the Biddeford Industrial Park, Correct Building Products hopes to nail down a piece of that growth with its premier product, CorrectDeck. The 2-year-old company is trying to distinguish itself in a highly competitive business dominated by Trex Co. of Winchester, Va., a publicly held powerhouse whose name has become almost synonymous with composite decking.

CorrectDeck has enjoyed some early success, though, by forging technical innovations and promoting its product in a regional market that stretches from Virginia to Ontario, Canada. The company sold out its entire capacity in 2001, enough boards to build an estimated 10,000 decks. Sales have doubled from last year, with annual gross revenues now approaching $6 million. The company is profitable, and busy enough to boost its work force from 12 to 22.

Martin Grohman, president of Correct Building Products, stands on a walkway, made from the company's own product, outside its Biddeford manufacturing site. Correct Building Products makes decking out of recycled materials. Staff photo by Faith Cathcart.

Having said that, 2002 has turned into a challenging year. The plant that was running full tilt last year is now at about 80 percent capacity, a situation blamed on new distributors who haven't done enough to get CorrectDeck into specialty lumber stores and in the hands of builders and consumers.

"No one should complain about 100 percent growth," said Martin Grohman, president and majority owner. "But there was more for us out there this year."

Pressure-treated wood helped pioneer a new trend in backyard living, when sales took off in the early 1980s. Impregnated with a brew of chromated copper arsenate known as CCA, the lumber was embraced for its ability to repel insects and water rot. Economically priced, it soon became the lumber of choice for outdoor structures ranging from decks to playgrounds.

But pressure-treated wood let us down. For all its durability, it degrades in sun and weather. In addition, the federal government has nudged the industry to phase out wood with CCA for home use by 2004, citing the potential risks of arsenic in the environment. Alternate preservatives are being licensed to replace CCA.

These developments have increased interest in more-expensive but naturally rot-resistant woods, such as domestic cedar and redwood, and tropical hardwoods, such as mahogany. They've also enticed entrepreneurs who believe they can use technology to engineer a more durable decking material. That was the opportunity envisioned by Martin Grohman.

Grohman grew up in western Maine, earned a chemical engineering degree in New York, and was working in the mid-1990s at the development lab of an Ohio company that makes extruding equipment. Aware that entrepreneurs were using the equipment to make composite decking materials, Grohman had an idea for starting a similar business in Maine using slightly different technology. He convinced a workmate with an electrical engineering background, Mike Hurkes, to take the plunge with him. In 1998, both men moved to Maine to start Correct Building Products.

The raw materials that go into CorrectDeck composite decking are sawdust and polypropylene. Staff photo by Faith Cathcart.

The men worked with the state's Small Business Development Center program to draw up a business plan. But lenders weren't impressed. So the partners raised $400,000 in working capital from what Grohman calls "the bank of family and friends," before finally securing an equipment loan from KeyBank. They also won a $100,000 commercialization grant from the Maine Technology Institute in 2000, which kept the fledgling company from running out of cash until sales revenue increased.

CorrectDeck boasts two technological distinctions designed to give it an edge over other composite decking. First, the boards are made with 40 percent polypropylene. Used in car bumpers and gas cans, polypropylene is considered stronger than polyethylene, the plastic used by most competitors. Second, CorrectDeck uses a special hot embossing method to create a deep grain pattern in the board. The embossing puts texture in the board surface and makes it look more like wood.

These techniques can be observed at the factory's automated assembly line.

The smell of sawdust hangs heavily in the air. No surprise, since the plant uses roughly 170 tons a week of hardwood sawdust, a byproduct of Maine lumber mills that is trucked here and stored in a 50-foot-high silo. Recycled sawdust makes up 60 percent of a CorrectDeck board by weight.

The sawdust is fed into a large rotary dryer until it's free of moisture. Then it's blended with polypropylene resin, heated to 500 degrees and sent through an extruder. Like a giant sausage maker, the machine squeezes the mix through a metal channel the shape of a 6-inch board. The hot mix passes by a rotating metal wheel that creates the wood-grain pattern.

The extruded board is then cooled and cut into lengths that range from 12 to 20 feet long. When running at capacity, the extruder can spit out a 16-foot deck board in about 90 seconds. The plant also can make boards in three different shades - natural, gray and cedar, the most popular.

The color and texture of composite decking are critical to sales. While homeowners may not get hung up over polypropylene versus polyethylene, they do have strong feelings about cosmetics.

A recent article on composite lumber in Professional Deck Builder magazine stressed this point. In the 1990s, the story said, composite decks were hard to sell because they looked bland.

"The manufacturers have made great strides in perfecting the lumber, and making it very attractive," the article said. "Many companies now produce materials with textures that are much more pleasing to the eye and colors that will give most homeowners the exact color they want."

In Maine, builders are starting to show a greater interest in composite lumber, according to Phil Lamoureux, general manager at Wickes Lumber in Portland. He sells both Trex and CorrectDeck, and said CorrectDeck has local appeal because it's made in Maine. But sales of each product are still small.

"We've been dealing with manufactured products in decking for years and they're not replacing wood," Lamoureux said.

Hancock Lumber in Kennebunk carries Trex, CorrectDeck and another competitor, WeatherBest. The store has a CorrectDeck display showing a porch, and has brochures promoting the product. The made-in-Maine connection also helps sales, according to Kelly Demers, a project adviser at the store.

"The CorrectDeck has been flying out of here," he said.

The typical buyer, Demers said, is an upper-middle-class homeowner who wants a maintenance-free deck and can afford the extra expense. Most buyers are what he called second- or third-generation deck owners.

"They've had the budget pressure-treated deck and got tired of it," he said.

Martin Grohman agrees with that assessment.

"The best customer for us," Grohman said, "is one who already had a pressure-treated deck."

But Grohman is also looking to expand into other structures, such as playgrounds, and into extruded products other than decking, such as dimension lumber. He also has an eye overseas, and may hook up with a distributor in the United Kingdom.

Speaking of distributors, Grohman is trying to refine his small network of wholesalers and find partners who will aggressively promote CorrectDeck. He has had the best success with a distributor on Long Island, N.Y., a market with plenty of wealthy residents and summer homes.

Beyond that, Grohman is trying to position Correct Building Products for a shakeout. More than a dozen companies got into the composite lumber business over the past few years, drawn by a product made from cheap sawdust that sells at a premium price.

But plastic is expensive and the market is fickle. Grohman knows he's going to have to step up marketing, through trade advertising and the Internet, for instance, to establish strong brand recognition. One optimistic statistic: Composite lumber today accounts for less than 15 percent of the total deck market.

"There's plenty of room for growth," he said.

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