Europe
and superior service. “Executives rate
greenness as a key differentiating factor for their company from competitors, “ Jens-Christian Blad, a McKinsey
consultant, told the Ecochem sustainable chemistry conference, in Basle,
Switzerland, in November.
Among the different aspects of greenness, executives of companies in Europe
attached more importance to biodegrad-ability and biobased materials than their
U.S. counterparts who put more value on
recyclability and non-toxicity.
The executives in Europe also had
the highest proportion of customers requiring or consistently purchasing green
products— 38 percent against 28 percent
in Asia and 13 percent in the U.S.
AkzoNobel, approximately two thirds
of whose annual sales are in coatings
with the remainder in speciality chemicals, has a target of 20 percent of its
revenue by 2020 coming from products
which provide a sustainability benefit to
its customers.
Already 9 percent of its raw materials expenditure is on biobased chemicals, which the company claims is
much higher than the average among
its industry peers.
“We would like to take that further, but we can’t affect our competive-ness with our customer base,” Peter
Nieuwenhuizen, AkzoNobel’s director
for future-proof supply chains, told the
Basle conference.
Nevertheless the company is aiming to
increase the share of biobased chemicals
in its raw materials spend from 9 percent
to 12 percent by 2020.
AkzoNobel is currently concentrating on boosting the application
of selected biobased raw materials
such as epichlorohydrin, acrylic acid,
acetone and n-butanol. “We can start
to see a path to the ‘greening’ of significant parts of our supply chain,
“Nieuwenhuizen said.
Currently certain drivers—like rap-
idly growing supplies of cost com-
petitive biobased materials, increased
demand and an emphasis on decreas-
ing carbon footprints—favored the rise
in sales of biobased raw materials, ac-
cording to Nieuwenhuizen. In addition
they have advantages for AkzoNobel,
such as providing alternative sources of
supply and, in terms of sustainability,
strengthening its position as a leading
global coatings company.
However, particularly in Europe, coat-
ings companies and their raw material
suppliers will need the support of of-
ficial standards to help bolster sales of
products which are biobased and/or meet
sustainability criteria.
The European Committee for
Standardisation (CEN), a European
Union-backed body, has stated that
standards for biobased products are
“essential elements in aggregating de-
mand” for them.
The European Commission, the
European Union’s executive, has man-
dated CEN to draw up standards on a
range of biobased chemicals, most of
which can be used in coatings.
The task is being carried out by a
technical committee which is liasing
closely with the main European trade
association for coatings and printing
inks (CEPE), as well as organizations
representing producers of fats and oils,
starches, solvents and bioplastics and
conventional plastics.
Fredric Petit, chairman of the com-
mittee who is also sustainability direc-
tor at DSM, a supplier of both biobased
and conventional raw materials for
coatings such as resins, warned the
Ecochem meeting that standardization
could be complex.
The process of creating a European
standard from the start of work on a
draft through to the approval of a de-
finitive text could take at least three
years, he said. Only then would a
standard be ready to be implemented
nationally across 33 countries, 28 of
them EU members with the remainder
non-EU countries like Norway, Iceland
and Turkey.
Besides the absence of standards,
another hurdle to the marketing in
Europe of biobased and sustainability
products is the necessity for chemicals
sold in Europe to be registered, with
safety profiles, under REACH, the
EU’s chemicals safety legislation. Some
chemical companies have been deterred
from launching new biobased products
in Europe because of the high cost of
gathering test data for REACH.
REACH is also posing difficulties for
coatings raw materials suppliers, particu-
larly pigment makers, who want to estab-
lish the sustainability of their products.
The European Chemicals Agency
(ECHA), Helsinki, Finland, which is
responsible for administering REACH,
has still not come up with firm criteria
for deciding whether the levels of persis-
tency, bioaccumulation and biodegra-
dation of pigments and other chemicals
with similar properties are hazardous to
the environment.
The agency is sceptical about the ac-
curacy of some testing systems for bio-
degradability and persistency which
have been authorized by the Paris-based
Organisation for Economic Co-operation
and Development (OECD), whose ap-
proved tests are accepted by regulators
across the world.
An expert group has been set up by
ECHA to help with the assessment of
and validation of testing methods for
chemicals suspected of being persistent,
bioaccumulative and toxic (PBT) or
very persistent and very bioaccumula-
tive (vPvB).
So far the PBT Expert Group has over
two years investigated around 150 sub-
stances, including coatings pigments and
biological products. It has fully assessed
11 with only one assessed as being PBT
or vPvB. With most of the rest it had stat-
ed it needs more information or test data.
At a recent conference on chemicals
persistency in Paris, Johanna Peltola-
Thies, an ECHA official, admitted that a
long list of scientific issues needed to be
clarified by the expert group.
The European Commission to which
ECHA is accountable, pledged last year
(2013) all prioritized PBTs or vPvBs
would be assessed by 2020. But it con-
ceded that some other potentially per-
sistent or bioaccumulative substances
could still be awaiting full evaluation
after that date.
Establishing the sustainability of some
coatings and their raw materials, even
biobased ones, in Europe could turn out
to be a lengthy procedure. CW
