Trinidad and To­ba­go has a pot­hole prob­lem, and the team at New Wave Road So­lu­tions Ltd saw not just a so­lu­tion but a po­ten­tial av­enue to max­imise one of T&T’s re­sources.

Six months ago, the com­pa­ny be­gan op­er­a­tions in this coun­try af­ter con­nect­ing with the UK com­pa­ny that pro­duces EZ Street As­phalt, a spe­cialised cold-mix prod­uct de­signed for ef­fi­cient pot­hole re­pair.

“We saw a gap in the mar­ket for pot­hole re­pairs,” said New Wave’s head of op­er­a­tions, Joshua Rogers, in an in­ter­view with Sun­day Busi­ness Guardian.

“Ob­vi­ous­ly, it’s no sur­prise. Trinidad has no short­age of pot­holes. That’s a dai­ly nui­sance for every­body, and it’s not be­ing dealt with quick­ly enough. There are more pot­holes be­ing made than can be re­paired. So, there was a gap in the mar­ket for that.”

The com­pa­ny has since be­come the Cari­com dis­trib­u­tor for the prod­uct, as the small busi­ness not­ed that these chal­lenges were not unique to T&T.

“We didn’t just want to sole­ly fo­cus on Trinidad. The whole of the Caribbean is deal­ing with bad roads. It’s some­thing that oth­er coun­tries, first world coun­tries have a a main­te­nance pro­gramme for. And we want­ed to bring that through the wider Caribbean,” said Rogers, who was raised in the UK.

“We didn’t want to just fo­cus on Trinidad. Trinidad is ob­vi­ous­ly, you know, quite small. We want­ed to ex­pand up the Caribbean. So far, we are just in St Lu­cia and a cou­ple of oth­er is­lands have pur­chased bags from us. But we want to in­tro­duce the main­te­nance pro­gramme on a larg­er scale.”

But what is unique to Trinidad is the La Brea Pitch lake, and Rogers told the Sun­day Busi­ness Guardian that the com­pa­ny has been in touch with Lake As­phalt about po­ten­tial col­lab­o­ra­tions and the pos­si­bly ex­pan­sion in­to lo­cal man­u­fac­tur­ing. The lat­ter part has be­come im­por­tant as for­eign ex­change has made the cost of do­ing busi­ness ex­or­bi­tant.

“Yes, the for­eign ex­change is ex­pen­sive, and that’s why the prices of our prod­uct are a lit­tle high­er than we would want. But we aim to ac­tu­al­ly man­u­fac­ture it,” said Rogers.

“Even­tu­al­ly we would love to get a source of bi­tu­men from Lake As­phalt. We’ve been ap­proached by agents from Lake As­phalt to try and get this prod­uct up and run­ning. They have tried to pro­duce a prod­uct sim­i­lar to it, but they’re miss­ing the poly­mer that EZ Street has patent­ed to make this long-last­ing prod­uct.”

While some might see the EZ Street prod­uct as a com­peti­tor to Lake As­phalt’s op­er­a­tions, Rogers is of the view that de­vel­op­ing the prod­uct here would be ben­e­fi­cial at sev­er­al lev­els.

“It’s re­al­ly just try­ing to see the big­ger pic­ture in the long run. That’s how we’ve been deal­ing with it. Yes, it’s ex­pen­sive to bring the prod­uct in. That’s why, prod­uct-wise, it is ex­pen­sive at the mo­ment. But, you know, there is a mar­ket for it. So it’s not to say we’re wast­ing our time with that,” he said.

“So when it comes to man­u­fac­tur­ing, we would love to start op­er­a­tions with­in the next year. That would ob­vi­ous­ly bring the price for the prod­uct dras­ti­cal­ly down,” he con­tin­ued, “and then mak­ing use of Trinidad’s nat­ur­al re­sources be­cause we have every­thing we need here in the coun­try to make the prod­uct mi­nus the poly­mer mod­i­fi­er. So it would make use of Trinidad’s nat­ur­al re­sources. We could be­gin ex­port­ing, and that would be great for the wider econ­o­my it­self.”

While the com­pa­ny has seen sig­nif­i­cant suc­cess, main­ly op­er­at­ing in pri­vate com­mu­ni­ties and re­pair­ing car parks and dri­ve­ways, he ex­plained the com­pa­ny is hope­ful that it can be­come in­te­gral to an on­go­ing main­te­nance pro­gramme for T&T’s pub­lic roads.

How­ev­er, he said that this would be de­pen­dent on buy in from the Gov­ern­ment.

“The biggest chal­lenge is get­ting it in­to the Gov­ern­ment’s hands so we can fix the pub­lic roads. That is our main fo­cus rather than just the pri­vate roads and com­mu­ni­ties that we are fo­cussing on now. We’ve done a lot of com­mu­ni­ties over the past six months, and we’d love to im­ple­ment the pro­gramme so that there’s a fast re­sponse team when it comes to pot­holes in all the bor­oughs across Trinidad,” he said.

“Lo­cal gov­ern­ment, like the bor­oughs, I think, could in­tro­duce it. If it is cen­tral gov­ern­ment, yeah, they could open up a kind of large na­tion­wide scale pro­gram to fix the pot­holes.”

For­mer Works and Trans­port Min­is­ter Ro­han Sinanan had pre­vi­ous­ly warned that pri­vate cit­i­zens should not take road paving in­to their own hands. In a no­tice in 2022, he stat­ed pri­vate cit­i­zens and busi­ness­es must check with the min­istry be­fore in­de­pen­dent­ly paving or re­pair­ing pub­lic roads.

Rogers agreed, stat­ing that reg­u­lar cit­i­zens may do more harm than good.

“Pri­vate cit­i­zens should not be fix­ing pub­lic roads; ob­vi­ous­ly that comes with its own prob­lems. Not all of them would have the knowl­edge or the abil­i­ty to do it prop­er­ly, and then that dam­ages the in­fra­struc­ture even more and al­so cars as well,” he said.

Rogers con­tin­ued, “And it makes our job hard­er. So yeah, cit­i­zens should kind of stay away from that. How­ev­er, with this prod­uct, it’s a lot hard­er to make mis­takes with it be­cause of its sim­plic­i­ty. It’s a lot hard­er to make those mis­takes.”

How­ev­er, he said the ease of use of the EZ Street prod­uct would al­low for eas­i­er im­ple­men­ta­tion should a main­te­nance pro­gramme be cre­at­ed.

“You could cre­ate jobs for the econ­o­my, you know. There’s a lot of pos­si­bil­i­ties with it. “

Rogers said the com­pa­ny has found suc­cess by keep­ing the cost of its prod­uct and op­er­a­tions down. How­ev­er, with eyes on ex­pan­sion, he ad­mit­ted that find­ing those agree­ments with the Gov­ern­ment and state agen­cies would be cru­cial.