The Quiet Before the Dawn

The European coatings industry – and indeed much of the global coatings industry – appears to be experiencing a much quieter time than has been witnessed for many years.

After continuous waves of acquisitions effected to broaden companies’ global and regional reaches, and after years and years of investments in new production facilities, much of this activity has quieted recently.

In the post-COVID era, the problems of distribution and access to raw materials have been superseded by geopolitical tensions in Eastern Europe and increasingly in the Middle East. One of the things that business appreciates is certainty, and in the current environment that is in short supply.

Where there have been acquisitions in recent years they have been in markets and locations far away from geopolitical turmoil, such as in Latin America on the part of AkzoNobel, and more recently Kazakhstan, on the part of Nippon Paint.

Companies remain active in pursuing pieces to pick off for their globalization jigsaw puzzle, but with time the pool from which they choose seems to be dwindling, unless they break new ground with different strategies (which is what Nippon Paint is doing at the moment).

Modern Perspectives and a ‘Perspectief’

So where have companies been concentrating their efforts and strategies if not in overseas growth?

Three areas stand out. First, there is the sphere of sustainability, second there is the domain of technology, and finally there are the areas associated with energy.

All of them are commanding newer collaborations and imperatives within industry and supply chains, although the sustainability agenda is much higher in Europe than it is in other parts of the world. What we have seen in the distant past has been the consortium-based cooperation of many top companies and high-tech start-ups in areas such as a biotechnology that have been targeting the development of new paths to recycled materials.

However, more recently AkzoNobel announced that it had signed up to be part of a new major government-funded project in the Netherlands that tackles sustainability from the other angle. Called Perspectief, the project has drawn more than 80 industry participants into a variety of consortia aimed at progressing the greater recycling of materials.

Seven broad consortia have been established as part of the government-funded Perspectief program. AkzoNobel will play its part by taking a leading role in the SusInkCoat project, which will explore how to make inks and coatings more sustainable.

The company will work together with private partners and other societal stakeholders to develop new materials, processes and applications to improve the durability, functionality and recyclability of coatings, thin films and inks. This research programme, which will be five years in length, is backed by the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Policy and the Dutch Research Council (NWO).

“Our discussions about collaborating with our SusInkCoat partners have been very positive,” says André van Linden, AkzoNobel’s R&D director of scientific academic programs, who is also the co-lead of SusInkCoat. “We’re all facing the same societal challenges – how to become more circular – and we’re looking for the same solutions in different application areas. But we’ve never done that together for this specific research topic, so we need an ecosystem to help us solve these challenges.”

Van Linden adds that the program – one of many R&D projects the company is involved with – will also support AkzoNobel’s ambition to achieve 50% fewer carbon emissions in its own operations and across the value chain by 2030.

“We want to make the recyclability of materials – such as furniture, building materials and steel constructions – easier by introducing functionalities like self-healing, higher durability and triggered release,” he continues. “The more you can leave the materials in their original state, the more sustainably you can operate.”

AkzoNobel will be working alongside Canon, Evonik, GFB, PTG and RUG Ventures, which together have extensive knowledge of market demands, supply chains and production processes. All the SusInkCoat partners will work with academic researchers at several Dutch universities in an effort to identify promising developments that can be commercialized, used for education purposes or for outreach to the public.

Regular readers of this column will be aware that what is happening with the sustainability agenda is expected to usher in a new dawn for industry with the development of renewable coatings based on a raft of sustainable technologies that will bring much greater growth over the next quarter of the century, as the EU seeks to continue its greening by 2050.

Such major ambitions require phenomenal research and collaborative efforts, which is what industry is currently undertaking.

Mastering Eco-Friendliness from Every Angle

Eco-friendliness within the coatings industry continues to be the primary imperative for companies within Europe, with environmental awareness being pre-eminent in both the consumers’ and the end-users’ minds.

This theme is ushering in many different ways to make production greener, while simultaneously leading to many refinements in the final coatings themselves and what they represent in reducing energy consumption. (This is also a strong echo of the thinking happening within the European Council as far as chemistry is concerned.)

Powder coatings are a long-established sector that has experienced greater popularity in recent years, coupled with much innovation from the energy reduction angle. Considerable energy-reduction advances in this sector have already been laid out by AkzoNobel, the clear leader in powder coatings.

Very recently AkzoNobel completed an expansion of its largest powder coatings factory in Europe – at Como in Italy – which is especially apposite given the strength of the Italian white goods sector.

Four new manufacturing lines are now operational following the €21 million project – two of them dedicated to automotive primers and two to architectural coatings. New bonding equipment lines have also been added, to ensure that the products meet and exceed industry standards.

“Increasing our capabilities in Como is a significant milestone which supports our ambition to create safety of supply for our customers,” explains Sanal Limoncuoglu, commercial director of AkzoNobel’s Powder Coatings business in South and East Europe (S&EE) and Middle East Africa (MEA). “We’re now well equipped to serve all our customers in the EMEA region with highly efficient lines that are state-of-the-art in terms of consistency and quality.”

AkzoNobel’s Como site is the company’s largest plant for producing powder coatings. It supplies products for seven main market segments: home appliances; architecture; automotive; agriculture and construction machinery; trade coaters; furniture; and general industry.

The extra capacity in Como has been installed in a renovated building where powder coatings were originally made – a sustainable reuse of an existing part of the site, which was established in 1992. The new lines also use recycled energy and are focused on meeting the highest standards in sustainable production, supporting the company’s ambition to reduce its carbon emissions by 50% by 2030.

More of the Three Rs

Marketing, PR or otherwise, one can’t help noticing the three Rs in that last paragraph: reuse, recycle and reduce. And that is very much the vocabulary we should expect more of from the coatings industry in the coming years.