Coatings World - February 2017

by Arnold Wang China Correspondent

China is not a pioneer in developing and adopting new technologies, or more precisely, green technologies, until the past few years. Society pressure for improving the environment of living space has led to the releases of a variety of environment protection regulations, spanning from coal mining to automotive production. And more regulations are foreseeable to be released in the future, result-ing into the speed-up of adoptions and commercialization of new and green technologies in China. So one interesting phenomenon is that although many new technologies are developed in large international companies’ R&D center in America or Europe, their industrialization in a large scale can only be seen in China or other countries in the Asia Pacific region.

Compared with China, America does not see such a quick increase of regulations restricting VOC release from coatings and adhesives. And government officials and scientists are still debating whether the earth is getting warmer. American national standards for VOC limitation on coatings are lagging behind that of China and Europe. But certain states such as California implement their own regulations, which have strictier VOC limitations than at the national level.

As a result of this difference between the world’s two largest economic countries, in some market segments the technology adoptions in America are lagging behind those in China. The environment protection regulations in China are pushing the coatings companies to speed up the adoption and industrialization of new coatings technologies including high solid, solvent-less and waterborne at a speed which has never seen