Painting chemistry green.This month's cover article is on green chemistry for coatings. Reducing the environmental footprint of paint manufacture and application has been the focus of a great deal of research and development work in the industry for many years. Our products have become progressively cleaner, greener and ultimately more sustainable. The focus on environmental issues has often been implicit rather than explicit, but it has been reflected in the large and growing fraction of the presentations at ICE and in the number of editorial pages of our publications devoted to non-polluting coatings, coatings based on renewable resources Noun 1. renewable resource - any natural resource (as wood or solar energy) that can be replenished naturally with the passage of time natural resource, natural resources - resources (actual and potential) supplied by nature , and functional coatings that provide corrosion protection or anti-fouling properties with reduced environmental impact. What strikes me is that much of the green chemistry effort has shifted from being driven by regulatory and "feel-good" motivations to being driven explicitly by business requirements--cost advantages and performance improvements--in addition to environmental benefits. A few days after we had completed the planning of this issue and Cynthia Challener had finished her article outlining the impact of green chemistry initiatives in the coatings industry, the July 12, 2004, Chemical and Engineering News arrived in my mailbox A simulated mailbox in the computer that holds e-mail messages. Mailboxes are stored on disk as a file of messages, a database of messages or as an individual file for each message. The standard mailboxes are usually In, Out, Trash and Junk (Spam). with a cover article on the EPA-administered Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Awards. Here, too, the technologies described seem driven as much by business sustainability as by environmental issues. There has, overall, been great progress made and I think we can honestly claim to be contributing to solving environmental problems--not creating them. This issue also includes a Business Forum article on "Planning and Implementing an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) An integrated information system that serves all departments within an enterprise. Evolving out of the manufacturing industry, ERP implies the use of packaged software rather than proprietary software written by or for one customer. System." The latest installment in our Analytical Series discusses the evaluation of organic coatings with electrochemical electrochemical /elec·tro·chem·i·cal/ (-kem´i-k'l) pertaining to interaction or interconversion of chemical and electrical energies. e·lec·tro·chem·i·cal adj. impedance impedance, in electricity, measure in ohms of the degree to which an electric circuit resists the flow of electric current when a voltage is impressed across its terminals. spectroscopy spectroscopy Branch of analysis devoted to identifying elements and compounds and elucidating atomic and molecular structure by measuring the radiant energy absorbed or emitted by a substance at characteristic wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum (including gamma ray, . And as usual we feature news of the Federation, people in the industry, and new products. JCT JCT Junction JCT Jerusalem College of Technology JCT Joint Contracts Tribunal (UK build contracts governing body) JCT Journal of Coatings Technology JCT John Christner Trucking JCT Journal of Curriculum Theorizing COATINGSTECH is here to provide a forum for news of the coatings industry and updates on new products and advances in coatings technology. Let us know how we're doing. I look forward to your comments and to your contributions to JCT COATINGSTECH and to our sister technical publication, JOURNAL OF COATINGS TECHNOLOGY RESEARCH. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Ray A. Dickie Editor |
|
||||||||||||||||
Printer friendly
Cite/link
Email
Feedback
Reader Opinion