The most common number associated with sustainability is zero. In the coatings industry, many of us have worked on achieving targets for Zero VOC, Zero Waste, Net Zero Emissions. This use of the number zero to represent our sustainability targets is a reflection of our industry’s sustainability paradigm that traces its roots to the principles of green chemistry laid out back in 1998. We think of sustainability in terms of “doing no harm” to health and the environment in the products we make and how we make them, with zero harm being the ultimate target.

This approach to sustainability is not unique to the coatings industry – indeed companies in just about every industry have adopted Net Zero targets. While it is just as important for coatings companies to achieve such Net Zero goals as it is for companies in other sectors for the world to achieve its climate goals, there are unique characteristics of the coatings industry that can allow us to concurrently broaden our sustainability thinking in terms of going beyond zero – to not just be net neutral but actually be a net positive. Paint technology has developed products that go beyond doing no harm to actually making a positive impact on the environment. And the more we can involve our customers in using such products, the more we can multiply that positive impact.

Pacific Paint (Boysen) Philippines, Inc., the largest paint manufacturer in the Philippines, has adopted this expanded notion of sustainability. In addition to implementing programs to make green paints in a green way, the company is using coating products to help address two critical environmental challenges in the Philippines – air pollution and climate change.

Painting Solar Powered Air Purifiers

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), air pollution is the single greatest environmental risk to human health, with an estimated 6.7 million premature deaths annually across the world due to air pollution. A WHO study from May 2018 found that the Philippines ranked third in deaths due to outdoor air pollution (45.3 deaths per 100,000 individuals).

Any visitor to Manila can easily see why. Rush hour traffic forces vehicles to sit idly in traffic, where they emit pollutants like nitrogen oxides (NOx) and volatile organic compounds (VOCs), which react under sunlight to form a thick layer of smog that hovers over the city and silently shortens the life span of the city’s people.

There are few practical ways available to clean these pollutants once they exit a vehicle’s exhaust pipe. A possible solution would be to install air purifiers all over the city, but this is so difficult that no city has tried doing this. However, our external environments are full of paintable surfaces – and paint technology can now transform all those surfaces into solar powered air purifiers. Air purifiers that can be easily installed by painting, don’t require maintenance, can’t be stolen, and keeps working as long as they’re exposed to ultraviolet (UV) light.

In various parts of Manila, the paint being used to convert ordinary walls to air purifiers is Boysen KNOxOUT, the world‘s first air-cleaning paint with CristalACTiV photocatalytic technology. It has been proven to break down air pollutants such as nitrogen oxides (NOx), sulfur oxides (SOx), and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and convert them into harmless substances through a process called photocatalysis, a natural reaction occurring in presence of light, water and oxygen (Figure 1).

On a KNOxOUT paint film, light energy activates the ultrafine TiO2, which then converts ordinary water vapor into free radicals that break down NOx that come into contact with the surface of the TiO2 particles. Because of its small size – 6,500 of the TiO2 particles can be laid end to end across the width of a human hair – a gram of the material has a surface area of a tennis court, and this large surface area promotes a high level of contact and activity with air pollutants.

The NOx gas is converted into very diluted nitric acid, which is rapidly neutralized by alkaline calcium carbonate particle in KNOxOUT, producing harmless quantities of calcium nitrate, water, and negligible amounts of carbon dioxide and water. Calcium nitrate is water soluble and easily removed from the film, leaving a fresh surface ready to engage the next pollutant to come into contact with the film. Because the ultrafine TiO2 is merely a catalyst in generating free radicals, it is not consumed in the reaction, allowing KNOxOUT to continually clean the air as long as exposed to sufficient light.

While most of the industry was focused on developing zero VOC paints, KNOxOUT introduced the concept of a negative VOC paint that could remove more VOCs in the environment than the amount of VOCs in the paint formula. More significantly, by giving anyone with a paint brush the power to transform an ordinary wall into a solar powered air purifier, it was expanding our industry’s sustainability efforts to include our customers. Since just about everyone can use a paint brush, everyone could now become part of the solution to air pollution.

To highlight the empowering nature of this technology, Boysen launched the world’s first large scale air cleaning public art project using KNOxOUT along EDSA, the busiest and most polluted roadway in Metro Manila. EDSA had been the scene of the People Power Revolution in 1986, and 5,000 square meters of wall along this road was transformed into air purifiers.

One stretch of colorful lung shaped trees captures the essence of the project – the painted trees are not simply representation of trees, they are acting as if they were live trees. For just as trees act as lungs of the earth by converting carbon dioxide to oxygen through photosynthesis, these painted trees are acting as lungs of the city by converting noxious air pollutants to harmless substances through photocatalysis. And while limited space prevents people from planting more trees, anyone could paint a tree with KNOxOUT.
This concept was expanded internationally with the City Forests project of Converse that used KNOxOUT to install air cleaning artworks in Warsaw, Bangkok, Lima, Belgrade, Sao Paolo, Johannesburg, Santiago and Sydney. Lima already had about 20 artworks using KNOxOUT in different parts of the city due to the work of an NGO called AIRE, and Warsaw also had several air cleaning murals installed by Eco Evolution.

Rooflecting Climate Change

Climate change has been called the defining crisis of our time by the United Nations, and a report from the Institute for Economics and Peace has identified the Philippines as the country most at risk from the climate crisis. While most climate change mitigation strategies such as moving away from fossil fuel based sources for energy and transport are beyond the influence of most individuals, our industry has a very accessible product that scientists have identified as an easy, cheap and effective way to help fight climate change – white roof paint.

Scientists have been telling us for many years that white roofs not only help cool down not just the building they’re painted on, but also cool down our cities and ultimately the planet. White roofs reduce heat entering a building, lowering air conditioning requirements, and even increase efficiency of solar panels, thus reducing greenhouse gas emissions.   White roofs also lower heat going to the city, reducing not just the heat island effect but also the production of ozone and smog in our cities. Most importantly, white roofs increase the earth’s albedo, reflecting heat energy from the sun back into outer space where it cannot be trapped by greenhouse gases.

Stephen Chu, the Nobel Prize winning scientist and former U.S. energy secretary, pushed for painting white roofs and driving white cars in a climate change symposium attended by 20 Nobel Prize winning scientists way back in 2009. The California Energy Commission did a study that estimated that a 93 m2 roof could offset 10 tons of CO2 emissions over 20 years. A 2012 study by Concordia University estimated that painting roofs white and using light-colored materials to surface roads and pavements would offset the amount of CO2 generated by all the cars in the world for 50 years.

In the Philippines, the most popular form of residential roofing are galvanized iron sheets that are usually repainted every five to 10 years. Historically, there has been a preference for dark colored roof paints – about 90% of all roof paints sold are dark greens, reds or blues. Knowing that most people prefer to repaint their roof in the same color, Boysen provided more reflective versions of dark colored roof paints using infrared-reflecting (IR) pigments under its Cool Shades line.

However, the total solar reflectance of these colors were still significantly lower than Cool Shades White, which has advanced dirt pick up resistance properties to extend its reflective properties. Given the gravity of the climate crisis, we wanted to help our customers understand that the most effective way they could do their share in the fight against climate change was to repaint their roof white and turn it into a ‘rooflector’.

To get the message across, Boysen partnered with the country’s Climate Change Commission to launch the Paint It Light Initiative for Climate Change Consciousness Week back in November 2013. To help people visualize the power of white roofs, Boysen is undertaking one of the first large scale white roof community repainting projects in the world specifically to fight climate change. In a community in Baguio, which has been identified as the most vulnerable city to climate change in the country, more than 700 homes are having their roofs repainted white to create a “Rooflector Village.”

The project has been delayed by lockdowns brought about by the pandemic, but the hope is that seeing a community of white roofs will inspire Filipinos to put rooflectors in their own communities, and eventually white roofs can be the new normal in the Philippines, the way they have been for generations in some European towns.

From Zero To Heroes

Coatings have long been used to protect and beautify the world around us, but technical advances have now added functionality that enable them to improve the conditions around us. This capability to provide ordinary people with easily accessible products that can help cool the planet or clean the air opens up an exciting new frontier of sustainability for the coatings industry. In addition to our current internal focus on making our companies greener and safer, we can expand our concept of sustainability to think about how our products can be used in the external environment to help make our communities, our cities, and ultimately our planet greener and safer.

For people aspiring to be part of the solution to some of our most pressing environmental concerns today, our industry can provide them with innovative tools to do so. And because painting is a relatively common activity, we have the power to transform ordinary people into sustainability heroes by choosing a product that makes the strongest positive environmental impact.

A homeowner can repaint their dark roof white to offset his carbon emissions. A logistics company can paint air purifiers along a busy roadway to neutralize the NOx emissions of its vehicle fleet. Our industry becomes an enabler and a partner in helping others achieve their sustainability goals, while increasing the positive sustainability impact of the coatings industry at the same time.

There are many innovative and exciting sustainability programs in the coatings industry today that are reducing our footprint on the environment. But if we limit the ultimate goal of our sustainability work to benign harmlessness, we would be selling the potential of our industry short. The coatings industry is uniquely positioned to achieve sustainability goals on two fronts – minimizing the negative environmental impact of our operations, while simultaneously maximizing the use of industry products that have a positive impact on the environment. The exigency of our environmental crises today calls for us to put our best efforts on both fronts. While our companies work on the road to zero, we need to make as many heroes among our customers as we can to help
the cause.

Johnson Ongking is recently retired Vice President of Pacific Paint (Boysen) Philippines, Inc, which was awarded Sustainable Company of the Year at the Global Responsible Business Leadership Awards in 2018.

References

1. J Ongking, G Fontejon, J Kerrod, R McIntyre. “Beyond Zero: A Negative VOC Paint That Reduces VOCs in the Air.”, Asia Pacific Coatings Journal, Oct/Nov 2012, pp. 24-27.
2. Michael Magallanes, “Cool Roofs and Photovoltaics: An Unlikely Pair.” Facility Management Journal, Jul/Aug 2011, pp. 42-45.
3. https://coolcalifornia.arb.ca.gov/roof-environment
4. Hashem Akbari, H Damon Matthews, Donny Seto. “The long-term effect of increasing the albedo of urban areas.” Environmental Research Letters, 2012; 7 (2): 024004 DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/7/2/024004

Your Technology – Our Chemistry

Siltech develops, manufactures and markets a full and unique line of organo-functional silicones. With more than 35 years of experience, and two manufacturing facilities, we offer a broad portfolio of cationic, quaternary, alkyl and reactive silicones for many markets including Siltech Coatings Additives and Silmer® Reactive Silicones.  

To increase our sustainability, Siltech has developed a new series of Farm to Lab Coatings Additives which are redesigned with enhanced bio-feedstock content instead of petroleum. These Silsurf® Bio coatings additives, in which the formerly petroleum derived portions of the molecule are now derived from corn or sugar cane, have been shown in our labs to behave the same as the petroleum based analogues. Depending on the structure these have up to 80% new carbon. 

In keeping with this made from botanical plants instead of petroleum plants theme, we have recently found a similar supply for the alpha olefins needed to make our Silwax product line bio-sourced. We are now evaluating these Silwax® Bio products. These two product chemistries form the bulk of chemistries used for silicone coatings additives.

On another front, we are exploring the replacement of fluoroalkyls, which are under regulatory pressure today. Using our silicone resins and/or silicone surfactants many fluoroalkyl applications such as AFFF, slip, hydrophobic and some lipophobic applications have been successfully resolved.    

Finally, we are breaking ground on our third manufacturing facility and are designing into that plant sustainability improvements such as removing solvents and reducing water usage and waste streams. Energy in Ontario is largely nuclear which is about as clean as one can get today.