tive of the British Coatings Federation
(BCF) and head of the working group.
“Some data is inconsistent because it
comes from different sources,” he said.
“Some data on raw materials is not appropriate for the coatings sector and needs to
be made more specific. There are also many
gaps in data in some parts of the coatings
supply chain, which have been filled by people making different estimates.
“We will be working closely with raw
material trade associations which have
already been putting a lot of effort into
collection of data,” Mash said. “We
don’t want to duplicate what they’ve
been doing but to make sure the data is
consistent with the way the coatings in-
dustry does things.”
The Cepe task force’s first job, which
it hopes to complete next year, is to create
cradle-to-gave databases for LCIs. These
will cover raw materials extraction and
production through to the exit gate of the
coatings manufacturing plants, so they in-
clude indicators of paint making
processes, like energy consumption, water
conservation and internal recycling loops.
There are uncertainties about how the
task force will deal with the gate-to-grave
part of the life cycle because of the huge
variety of coatings uses and difference in
application methods.
“In due course we will be doing some
work on this area, possibly by drawing
up some scenarios which will provide
general examples of gate-to-grave activities,” said Mash.
With raw materials accounting for 60
to 80 percent of the energy content and
ultimately the carbon footprint of paints,
the working group will be relying a lot
on the input of experts from companies
making binders, pigments, solvents and
other ingredients.
Some of these producers of raw materials, such as Dow Chemical, which is represented on the task force, have been
developing LCIs and LCAs for over 15 years.
“We’ve been generating LCI data since
the 1990s, some of which we’ve passed on
to our customers,” said Houshang Kherad-mand, European technology awareness and
innovation manager at Dow Coatings Materials, which recently acquired the coatings
ingredients business of Rohm and Haas.
“We believe that we’ve one of the
biggest existing databases for LCIs on coat-
ings materials,” he said. “Coatings LCIs in
themselves are the big part of LCAs.”
The Cepe working group wants to
avoid influencing the types of LCAs car-
ried out by coatings companies and their
raw material suppliers. Some life cycle
analysis, for example, are used to forecast
future medium-term and long-term de-
mand for particular products while others
concentrate on the historical data on the
environmental and health impact of coat-
ings and their raw materials.
“Our aim is to provide consistent data
for the calculation of LCAs, whatever type
of analysis companies might apply,” said
Mash. “We want to be confident that the
various software packages which will be
available to coating producers for LCA
work and will be based on a platform of
solid and reliable data.”
Gaining agreement within the working
group on standardized data in some areas
may be difficult. With biomaterials, for ex-
ample, compromises may have to be
found between different approaches to
questions like land use, biodiversity and
conservation of natural resources.
When measuring carbon footprints of
biomaterials one issue will be how much
the ability of plants to absorb CO2 should
be taken into account.
“We include CO2 absorption in our
own calculations for the carbon footprints
of biomaterials in our coatings products,”
said Jan Besamusca, innovation director
at DSM Resins. “We want our customers
to be using the same CO2 data when
making their own carbon footprint calculations so we are hoping that the Cepe
working group will adopt our approach.”
Establishing data uniformity on
sources of energy consumption and their
links to CO2 emission levels will be one
of the working group’s biggest challenges.
Europe obtains its electricity from gas,
coal, hydropower, nuclear power and
from renewable resources such as wind
turbines and solar energy.
Does the working group opt for averages or specific figures from each power
source? Resolving issues like these will do
a lot to raise the credibility of LCAs in the
coatings sector in Europe. CW
