DEVELOPMENT OF THE PIPELINE RENOVATION MARKET IN POLAND AS ILLUSTRATED BY COMPACT PIPE

摘要

The condition of underground infrastructure in Poland at the beginning of the 1990s was very poor. The length of the water supply, sewage and gas network was relatively small, compared with Western Europe, and the installation materials used at the times of socialism were of very low quality; the same can be said about workmanship. Following the political change in 1989, a rapid expansion of the municipal infrastructure started, facilitated by the development of local administration. In addition to the construction of new pipelines, much more attention was paid to the technical rehabilitation of the existing infrastructure. Initially, the rehabilitation techniques developed in Western Europe proved to be too expensive in many situations. However, with time, their technical and economic attractiveness has grown. Presently, most rehabilitation techniques known in Western Europe are used in Poland, including the Compact Pipe method developed by Wavin and introduced in Poland in 1997. Initially two, and presently three Compact Pipe licensees operate over the entire territory of Poland. Up till today, they have used Compact Pipe to renovate over 30 km of different pipelines. Some of them are presented in the second part of this paper.