Van Reekum Materials

water extraction and drainage

VRM is a company of many products and services with the focus on water extraction and/or drainage. This means filter pipes for environmental soil research , well filters, hand drilling tools, soil grinding machinery, coupling material, drill piping, SWN80 hand pumps, earth heat probes etc.

VRM delivers a lot to engineering agencies, soil drilling companies and the GWW-sector who are all active in soil. Core business is production of plastic filter pipes. About 120.000 meters is produced yearly. A special pipe is the so-called “BioPipe”. Director Hans van Kampen: “Pipes are being put in the ground during all construction projects to determine if the ground is clean or not. This declaration is mandatory. Up until now we used plastic pipes and left them in the ground afterwards. We now have developed a bio-degradable pipe that will turn into compost after five months underground.

Another innovation realized recently is the LevelLog: a measuring unit placed atop a measuring tube for measuring the ground water level exactly which is then wirelessly sent to the measuring net’s administrator. This way ground water levels can be monitored more efficiently, much easier and faster as before. There is a big market for this revolutionary measuring system in the Netherlands, but also abroad.

VRM delivered a lot of water pumps to mainly Africa in the past. Together with engineering agency DHV, VRM built an indestructible water pump. Tens of thousands of these are placed all over Africa at the moment. Van Kampen: “The fun is that this pump is conquering the Dutch market too since a few years. More and more playgrounds, schools and nature parks in the Netherlands are being equipped with our SWN80. Also in Apeldoorn you will find many of our pumps”.

Currently export delivers about 30% of the revenue. Van Kampen sees this becoming more important in the future: “I expect this to rise to 50% eventually. We just arrived at the French market and that looks promising. We are also looking at the United Kingdom. We also do a lot of indirect export: membrane filters produced by us are delivered in substantial amounts to a Dutch client, who do worldwide export of these.”