Keywords: green, environmental, eco-friendly, innovation, technology, VOC, volatile organic compounds
MTS Painting is committed to doing all we can to keep our community safe and clean for future generations. It is very important for paint companies to adopt eco-friendly practices and procedures. Paint innovation and technology is advancing alongside other industries to develop products that are safer to use and safer to dispose of.
Here are some of the steps MTS Painting has incorporated into our daily routine. Our professional estimators take great care when evaluating how much paint will be necessary to complete a project. We avoid buying too much paint. Whatever leftover paint our customers don’t want to keep is repurposed as primer for future jobs. What can’t be used for priming is donated to an organization that mixes paint and discounts it to be used for projects in very low-income neighborhoods.
Our crew sets empty five-gallon plastic paint buckets out in our yard to let that wonderful Arizona sun dry what’s left in the bottom. Then they peel the dried paint out, leaving a reusable five-gallon bucket. We give these away to family, friends, and neighbors. They are very popular. The dried paint can be safely discarded as ordinary trash which is landfill safe.
We use a very simple but effective filtration system at our wash up sink. As our painters clean their brushes and rollers, the filter screens out all solids, keeping them out of the city sewer system. The residue caught by the filter is captured, dried, and discarded as ordinary trash.
In our in-house painting room, we have replaced solvent-based lacquer coatings with water borne lacquer finishes. This change has reduced the VOCs. VOCs are volatile organic compounds, chemicals that have a high vapor pressure at room temperature. High vapor pressure correlates to volatility which means flammability and explosiveness. Also, VOCs are responsible for the offensive odor of solvent-based coatings. Water borne lacquer coatings maintain the durability of a lacquer finish, without the environmental problems caused by a solvent-based finish. It’s good for the environment, and also good for our painters and our customers.
Adopting environmentally friendly business practices helps our community and provides benefits to MTS Painting like controlling costs, making us popular with friends and neighbors and giving us the warm feeling that comes from doing the right thing. Call us if you’re planning a painting project.
