Travels with Terry

Capillary concrete bunker liner
Martin Sternberg, CGCS, at the Torrekulla Golf Club in Gothenburg, Sweden, has been a certified golf course superintendent for 20 years, a golf course owner and a golf course builder for 27 years. Sternberg invented Capillary Concrete (CC), a U.S. patent pending porous bunker lining material that is working quite well on golf course bunkers in Europe. CC comes in 1-cubic-yard tote-type bags that are placed in a cement mixing-type machine, water is added then it is placed in the bunker in piles and then shoveled and raked to a 2-inch depth. Each bag covers about 150 square feet. This material is unique because it forms a firm but resilient base material in the bunker that is completely porous allowing water to drain through it into the sub-surface drainage piping. CC holds bunker sand on the slopes, helps keep weeds to a minimum and virtually eliminates washouts of soil into the bunker sand and it also keeps the drainage gravel and piping from getting contaminated.

The cost is about $2.25 (USD) per square foot or about $375 (USD) per 1-cubic-yard bulk-size bag that are shipped from North Carolina. The installation process takes about 3 to 5 hours per 1,000 square foot depending on where the produce is mixed, size, shape and slope of the bunker.

Jacques Leonard, superintendent, at the Golf de Nancy in Pulnoy, France, says: “We installed CC on all of our 49 sand bunkers this year, which is just short of 3,000 square meters on our 18-hole golf course and it is working real good. We have good bunker design with little water from the outside and we have perfect results now.”

CC is currently being tested in Florida and there are no superintendents who I know of using this product in the U.S. Still, there sure is a lot of interest in it.

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