With coating operations starting in January 2008 and lining operations later that year, there were a lot of nay-sayers in the construction industry who were highly critical of the newcomer. At the time, he had received input from Sweden and France to perfect his solution. Over the years, Lokkinen and his wife Jutta Ehder-Lokkinen reformed their existing old company and named it PICOTE Oy Ltd in 2008. Lokkinen started thinking: what if you could apply a coating process to existing pipes, where you simply add layers of coating into the plumbing system? – This way the old pipes would receive a remarkable “second life” and the required renovation effort would be both quick and inexpensive. 99% of pipes were not leaking, but we were demolishing entire bathrooms and pipes because of that 1%.” “It felt wrong somehow that we would tear out all the existing pipes because of a few leaks. We went in to fix the situation with a traditional method,” he looks back.Īs the project went forward, Lokkinen realized that there were, in the final analysis, only a handful of problem spots in the two houses – the 50-year-old pipes were, for the most part, in a surprisingly good condition. “There was a renovation project in Porvoo, Finland, involving two old apartment buildings which had leaking pipes. Lokkinen says that his original idea for in-house pipe lining dates back to 2001: Winner of several awards such the Finnish Innovator Award (2014), Lokkinen has a whopping 253 patents under his belt. Combining sustainability, environmentally friendly composition and an impressive lifespan of up to 50 years, Picote’s trenchless solutions exceed the requirements set for drain renovation.īehind the groundbreaking concepts, there is one man: co-founder, Chief Inventor Mika Lokkinen.

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