[As published in January/February BayBuzz magazine.]
Did you know you can recycle paint and its packaging in Aotearoa New Zealand? In fact, the country has a scheme to do just that – Resene PaintWise, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary.
If you’ve ever bought Resene paint you might’ve noticed a line on your receipt for the ‘PaintWise levy’ – a small charge which means you can take the containers and any leftover paint back to the store, for free, so it can be recycled or repurposed.
3R worked with Resene to design and implement the scheme two decades ago and have been operating it for them ever since. Over the years we started take back programmes for brands like Dulux and Wattyl too.
Since last year, we’ve been working with more paint industry members to develop an all-of-industry product stewardship scheme that meets Ministry for the Environment guidelines.
We recently visited the world’s biggest paint recycler, GDB, based in the United States to find out how they work, and learn from their 30 years of experience.
Paint recycling, American style
Like so many things in the United States the scale is far bigger than here in Aotearoa, and paint and packaging recycling is no different. While the country doesn’t have a nationwide scheme, 13 of its states do, through an organisation called PaintCare. The result is a huge amount of material to collect and recycle.
Each year GDB receives over 37.8 million litres of paint, plus its plastic and metal containers. Selling recycled paint back into the American market can be challenging, but they have also found markets overseas and send around 4,000 shipping containers of recycled paint to 63 countries each year.
This means the paint not only gets a second life, instead of going to landfill, but offers a competitively priced, high-quality paint to communities where this isn’t always an option.
The scale of their operation is also reflected by their team – they employ over 450 people. These range from processors, who get the paint out of the pails, through in-house specialists who test and reformulate it so they can remake and sell it.
A one-stop shop
Something we were particularly impressed with is how GDB tackles waste across the whole paint industry.
They do far more than just process paint left over from DIY and commercial painting jobs. They also deal with raw materials from chemical companies which are used to make paint, off-spec paint from manufacturers, unwanted bulk paint from warehouses and distributors, and damaged or mis-tinted paint from retailers.
They even collect damaged paint products to be recycled or repurposed. In one example they took a batch of damaged nine-inch rollers and simply cut them down to six inches, which meant they were able to sell them on.
The work GDB does isn’t just commercially valuable to them, but to the brands they work with too. They have helped a brand save around half-a-billion US dollars in landfill costs over 24 years, by recycling their factories’ waste products back into new paint.
Why did we go?
GDB are the world’s largest paint recyclers and have a wealth of knowledge and experience we believe we can apply here in Aotearoa New Zealand. We toured their three facilities and spoke directly to founder Sanjeev Bagaria and his senior staff.
It was a fascinating and eye-opening experience, as well as very encouraging to see the scale which can be reached and the positive impact.
It was also great to see that many of their processes are very similar to ours. They’ve found machines cannot replace people, but to achieve the best results you need a lot of thorough, manual labour to ensure quality standards are reached.
Regulation is the backbone
PaintCare represents paint manufacturers and operates product stewardship programmes in the states which have paint stewardship laws. It’s regulation which drives this work and here in New Zealand it’s also driving our work to create a nationwide, all-of-industry product stewardship scheme, alongside industry.
The regulation in Aotearoa relates to the packaging the paint is in, but the industry working group we are partnered with agrees the paint itself is an important part of any scheme. Finding circular solutions for the paint, such as a high value use like recycled paint, also reduces waste, saves resources, and creates jobs and economic value, so the work GDB does remanufacturing paint into a product which can be sold again is something we are very interested in.
Product stewardship essentially has two parts to it – recovering products at their end of life so they don’t end up in landfill or the environment and developing (preferably high-value) uses for the material so it can become part of the circular economy. It’s important that any regulation and the scheme itself is designed to support and encourage this.
Where to from here?
The trip has fed a lot of information into the work we’re doing with the New Zealand paint industry to develop a nationwide scheme, particularly around the remanufacture of paint.
It’s also clearly shown it’s possible to do this at scale and there are markets for the product – whether they are domestic or overseas. There are some exciting things afoot in this area of resource recovery. I look forward to giving you an update in the near future.
In the same way weeds are plants in the wrong place, so waste is a resource in the wrong location. With regulated product stewardship we can create a truly circular economy for paint and its packaging, and virtually any other product. Here in Hawke’s Bay, and throughout NZ, let’s make waste a resource rather than a problem for the next generations to deal with.
Dominic works at 3R, who design, implement and manage product stewardship schemes for individual businesses or industry-wide groups. They also help businesses take a fresh look at their waste to first minimise and then recover what would otherwise be wasted.
Photo supplied
