Fostering Success - Today's paints and coatings market poses many challenges for both manufacturers and suppliers. Increasingly stricter regulatory requirements coupled with greater general awareness of environmental issues make it essential for manufacturers to provide environmentally sound, sustainable products. And to be successful on the market, these products also need to offer the same high performance as conventional products. Water-based coatings are one way to fulfill the demand for sustainability. A new generation of additives enables them to offer the same or even higher performance as conventional coatings.

The economic downturn has not diminished the demand for sustainable products - consumers are just as concerned about the environmental impact and safety of products as ever before. Governments and manufacturers, meanwhile, have identified sustainable products as one of the world's key economic drivers and a way to combat global environmental problems.

New regulations such as the EU's volatile organic compounds (VOC) solvents directive of 2007 and the Decopaint directive place tight restrictions on the VOC emissions given off by paints and coatings. And new standards, such as LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) by the U.S. Green Building Council, are giving manufacturers additional incentives to focus on sustainable, low-impact products, processes and materials. As a result of the green trend, water-based coatings already have a higher market share than solvent-based ones: It is estimated that 80% of the approximately 14 million liters of architectural paints sold in 2007 were water-based, compared to 20% solvent-based.

More Than Green

Sustainability means more than simply being green - it also means enhancing overall efficiency. In order to be successful and to make a real impact on the market, green products need to provide at least the same performance as established solutions. With its Greenovating concept, Cognis Functional Products focuses on developing solutions for paints and coatings that combine performance and sustainability. The initiative is firmly rooted in Cognis' overall sustainability strategy and the 24 principles governing Green Chemistry and Green Engineering, which guide all of the company's activities. Following these principles, Cognis develops additives that help paint and coatings manufacturers to satisfy end users' demands for high-performing, sustainable coatings.

The Greenovating approach focuses on seven benefit dimensions that are in line with the current and future market demands: application, health, safety, degradability, toxicity, efficiency, and labeling. The concept provides a clear frame of reference for product development and a tool for checking the sustainability, environmental compatibility and performance dimensions of a product. It enables manufacturers to make verifiable claims and generates measurable advantages for coatings and ink products in order to be successful on the market.

Painting The Future Green

The four types of additives that the Greenovating concept focuses on are defoamers, rheology modifiers, coalescents and dispersing-wetting agents:
Defoamers prevent the formation of foam in paints when they are manufactured and when they are applied. This is crucial in making them easy to manufacture, apply and for creating excellent painted surfaces without fish-eyes or craters. Defoamer efficacy in paint production and during application after sitting on the shelf are key factors in the usability and overall utility of the end product. Most defoamers for architectural paints are still based on mineral oil, which is non-renewable and may contribute to semi-volatile organic compounds (SVOCs). But sustainable replacements are available: Defoamer formulations that are based on over 95% of native oils like soy bean, rape seed, sunflower, or rice bran oil or the ones based on polymer and organo-silicone emulsions have a very low VOC content. And since they are almost completely made from renewable resources or based on water as a carrier, they are also sustainable. These defoamers can show better performance than mineral oil-based standards: their defoaming efficiency is higher, they don't interfere with gloss development, and they contribute to a better indoor air quality.
As for rheology modifiers, or thickeners, they are also important to the paints' usability - for example, they help make one-coat coverage possible while reducing pigment settling when paint is stored. Cognis supplies VOC-free associative thickeners that help prevent paint from spattering when roller-painting ceilings and walls. They also make sure that surfaces are even, glossy and scrub-resistant. The quality of the thickener is therefore crucial to the usability, especially in architectural paints and impacts the overall quality of coated surfaces. New types of associative thickeners make coatings more sustainable, namely by offering much higher efficiency, which leads to reduced product use and by incorporating renewable building blocks instead of fossil-based technologies. A new high shear associative thickener from Cognis, for example, is up to 40% more efficient than the benchmarks, and a new low shear thickener with renewable building blocks can produce the same results as conventional thickener with less than half the amount.

Coalescents are organic solvents that are used to reduce the minimal film forming temperature (MFFT) of water-based paints so as to allow proper film formation under ambient conditions. Conventional coalescents account for a high percentage of the VOC content in paint formulations. New coalescing solvents developed by Cognis that are based on renewable raw materials have zero VOC content - resulting in excellent health and toxicity profiles and helping to make paints eligible for eco-labels. In addition, they are up to 30% more efficient than the most widely used conventional fossil-based coalescents. They also enable paint film hardness to develop much faster, meaning that a fresh coat of exterior paint picks up significantly less dirt, again boosting the usability and surface quality of the paint film.
Dispersants help disperse pigments in paint, thereby ensuring the hiding power and color that end users expect. Greater dispersant efficacy also results in improved stain and scrub resistance and in improved color development from pigments. Traditionally, dispersants were based on polymers and often on non-renewable chemistry. Cognis has found that by smart blending of dispersants based on renewable raw materials it is possible to offer an alternative. Inorganic pigments disperse just as well as when using polymeric dispersants, and for organic pigments, pigment load and paste viscosity can be lower. Such renewable-based dispersants offer improved compatibility and cost effectiveness.

Conclusion

Modern nature-based sustainable paint and coatings additives can be ideal alternatives to fossil-based ones: They can make the end product much more efficient and effective, thereby serving
key-market demands and providing unique marketing opportunities for paint manufacturers. End products made with these additives enable users to do more with less, reduce environmental impact, and are better for the health, safer, and less toxic. What's more, they often provide better performance, and can even be more cost effective. Today's coatings additives contribute to our customers' success and are sustainable in every sense.