"GB 37824-2019 emission standard of air pollutants for coatings, inks and adhesives industry" stipulates that "since August 2020, the emission control of air pollutants of existing enterprises shall be implemented in accordance with the provisions of this standard".
According to the new regulations, if the paint company exceeds the emission standard, the relevant enterprises and responsible persons will bear the legal responsibility. With the tightening of environmental protection policy and the promotion of "oil ban order" in nearly 100 cities in China, waterborne coatings have been pushed to the forefront of the storm.
Instead of solvent based coatings, what is the basis of waterborne coatings?
Water based coating is a new type of coating in the paint market, which is made of water as solvent or dispersion medium; solvent based coating is obtained by using organic solvent as dispersion medium.
The coating industry has always been considered as "three high" (high pollution, high energy consumption and high emission) industry. The amount of organic solvent discharged into the atmosphere during the coating manufacturing is 2% of the coating amount, and the organic solvent volatilized into the atmosphere during the coating process is 50% - 80% of the coating amount. Therefore, the traditional coating enterprises have high pollution cost and backward production capacity is gradually eliminated.
Since the 1970s, due to the formulation of environmental protection law and the strengthening of people's awareness of environmental protection, various countries have restricted the emission of organic solvents and harmful substances, thus the use of paint has been restricted. The appearance of water-based coatings represented by water-borne paint is praised as "the third coating revolution" in the industry.
In the aspect of environment-friendly, the biggest feature of water-based coatings is that water is used as diluent instead of solvent, which reduces the proportion of organic solvents in coatings, or even completely replaces organic solvents, so as to reduce the environmental pollution of coatings. The data show that VOC emission of waterborne coatings can be reduced by 60% - 70% compared with oil-based coatings.
In terms of safety, it can fundamentally reduce the solvent content in the coating, and avoid the fire hazard caused by solvent volatilization in the production and construction process, as well as the harm of solvent to human health.
In the market, water-based coatings for construction, water-based materials for material protection, water-based coatings for automobile coating and special functional water-borne coatings are widely used.
Due to the environmental protection policy, the innovation of new material technology, and the expansion of the application range of water-borne coatings, some organizations predict that the proportion of water-borne coatings in China will reach 20% within five years, and the output will increase by an average growth rate of 23%. Water based coatings have brought challenges to the original products and technologies of enterprises, and also brought opportunities for the development of environmental friendly industrial coatings enterprises. The "oil to water" industrial coatings has become the industry trend.
Policy tightening, new opportunities and challenges
Recently, Tangshan City, Hebei Province issued a notice, requiring the promotion of alternative use of paints (coatings) with low VOC content in key industries. It is required to complete the work of using water-based paints (coatings) and other low VOC content paints (coatings) in the surface coating industry by the end of June 2020.
With the rise of raw materials, the prevalence of environmental protection and the decline of overall market performance, the growth rate of waterborne building coatings products has been maintaining an upward trend. In the background of the popularity of water-based coatings, some enterprises play with concepts driven by interests, and produce water-based paint products when the technology is not advanced enough and the quality is not fully up to the standard.
On the one hand, water-borne coating equipment investment is large, storage conditions are high requirements, high operating costs. Under the pressure of environmental protection, some coating enterprises will build a water paint coating line in order to pass the EIA when they set up factories. After the normal operation, they still produce paint. In this way, it is claimed that the production and sale of waterborne coatings is actually "selling dog meat with sheep's head".
On the other hand, enterprises that want to occupy the market and have no research and development ability produce pseudo water-soluble paint, that is, water-soluble paint mixed with alcohol ether additives. Claimed to be able to combine the hydrophobicity of the paint and the environmental protection of the water paint, but after use, the paint faded off and the quality of the paint was unqualified, which led to the suspicion of the whole market.
According to professionals, the waterborne epoxy ester coating has the excellent characteristics of both epoxy system and dry oil, especially suitable for automobile parts. However, there are some problems in its application, such as slow drying speed, poor weather resistance and alkali resistance.
In the face of market shortcomings, industry experts suggest that China's water-borne coatings enterprises should strengthen the research and development of environmental protection and functional coatings products, strengthen the promotion of coating brands, and do a good job in the protection of intellectual property rights, product variety reserves, technical reserves, government protection, marketing personnel storage and other aspects of the work, which is China's coatings from a large paint production country to a coatings power must be done thing.
There is a big gap with foreign waterborne coatings. No matter in terms of technical strength or business model, most enterprises are small in scale, and their business is concentrated in the low-end and medium-sized coatings market with relatively low profit margin. In the future, "environmental protection" will become one of the key words in the development of the coating industry. If enterprises want to make breakthroughs in the industry, they should speed up the research and development of environmental protection high-tech coatings in combination with the current policies Material products.
