To Address Infrastructure Challenge, US Must Loosen Restrictions To Allow Innovation

President Trump in June signed a $19.1 billion disaster aid bill geared toward assisting communities across the nation to rebuild after hurricanes, floods, tornadoes and fires.

According to the legislation, $1.6 billion is necessarily included to help repair damaged highways and infrastructure, including to the United States Air Force to repair hurricane damage at Tyndall Air Force Base in the Florida Panhandle as well as flood damage at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska.

This is a critical first step in rebuilding after national disasters, but what about the rest of the nation’s infrastructure? The cold truth is that the nation’s overall infrastructure grade, as of 2017, is a D+ according to the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). Our bridges, highways and critical transportation infrastructure are failing under the weight of usual, every-day use. The same study from ASCE estimates that it will take $4.6 trillion just to get back to a B, and even more to maintain it.

The bottom line is that our country’s infrastructure has been on life support for decades. In 2015, then President-elect Trump promised to make our infrastructure “second to none.” To date, little has been done to deliver on this promise but it’s not too late.

We can bring the U.S. back to a top-10 infrastructure country in the world, but only if we remove the limits materials of construction requirements that were established in the turn of the last century.

We are undermining a critical link in the chain when it comes to the ability of American ingenuity to drive the future of our economy. The fact is that there are too many hurdles for innovators in America to jump over in order to bring new technologies to bear on these age-old problems of corrosion and infrastructure degradation.

One way for the government to potentially save billions over the next 10 years, for example, is by building with cheaper, stronger and more corrosion-resistant nanolaminated alloys and coatings. These materials can enable our infrastructure to endure centuries instead of decades.

The U.S. should be light years ahead when it comes to innovation, but a massive roadblock in our nation is that right now it takes more than 15 years to take a new industrial metals technologies through a regulatory specification and approval cycle.

The future of our nation should mean safer, durable and stronger infrastructure fueled by innovative materials that enable advanced designs. But, our own bureaucracies hindering this process. We have the future of materials available today to rebuild our nation’s infrastructure safer, smarter, more cost-effectively and sustainably – we need now to create a regulatory framework that lets us use them.

Christina Lomasney is CEO of Seattle-based Modumetal, which develops nanolaminated materials for use in armor, vehicles, building exteriors, and other products