And it’s happening in Aotearoa.

[As published in September/October BayBuzz magazine.]

When you think about recycling, what springs to mind? Paper and cardboard, plastic, glass, metal? How about paint?

Well, this year 3R Group partnered with Resene Paints to make RE:Paint – a high-quality remanufactured paint made from the paint recovered through the Resene PaintWiseTM product stewardship scheme. It’s now stocked in Mitre 10 stores around the country and is proving very popular, showing paint recycling in Aotearoa New Zealand is possible, and valued by New Zealanders.

The ongoing success of RE:Paint is a great indication that the public is on board – not only in terms of returning their unused paint to be recycled but also buying remanufactured product.

The upside for consumers is they can get a high-quality paint at a very affordable price, and they are part of a great, local, sustainability story – one based right here in Hawke’s Bay.

Paint and packaging stewardship

3R Group has run the Resene PaintWise^TM scheme for recovering paint and its packaging for 20 years. It works by charging a small fee when Resene customers buy paint, which allows them to return the containers and any unused paint for free when they’re done with it.

As the scheme manager, we collect the material and process it at our three resource recovery hubs in Auckland, Hastings, and Christchurch where we decant and scrape out the old paint for recycling. It’s labour-intensive but, as we learned while recently visiting the world’s biggest paint recycler GDB in the United States, it’s still the best way to recover as much material for recycling as possible.

Recycling the plastic pails and steel cans in New Zealand is straight-forward enough with the white plastic paint pails collected in the North Island being made back into new pails – a truly circular solution. Coloured plastic, and white plastic collected in the South Island, is recycled into new plastic products, while steel collected throughout the country goes to scrap metal recyclers.

It’s been hugely successful, keeping tens of thousands of tonnes of material out of landfill.

The paint challenge 

Recycling metal and plastic is one thing, but paint is more challenging. As you can imagine, it comes to us in various states, ranging from just about as good as new, to dried up and old as the hills.

A key part of any product stewardship scheme is innovation, like finding new and better uses for the recovered material. Ideally, it’s remanufactured back into the same product, or another high-value product – something we achieve with the pails.

Previously, the only viable domestic solutions for paint were using it as a replacement for setting agents in concrete or keeping usable paint to donate to community organisations.

However, RE:Paint is a truly circular solution for remanufacturing a large portion of the paint we collect back into new paint. In fact, we’ve found over 90% of the paint we recover through Resene PaintWise meets the standards to be reprocessed into a saleable product – a big win for the circular economy.

In classic Kiwi can-do attitude, we developed the production line from a small-scale setup by rejigging space at our Hastings resource recovery hub and expanding production as demand grew. Members of our Hastings resource recovery hub have now learned new skills as the production line ramps up.

RE:Paint has proven very popular, expanding rapidly from a trial in a few Mitre 10 stores to being available around the motu, with stores reporting a strong demand. In June we reached the milestone of 100 batches of paint made, just over six months after first trialing it, with no sign of things slowing down.

But we can’t rest on our laurels and we’re always refining and improving the process to make it more efficient. 

How we got here

Our Innovation team spent a lot of time researching, testing, and tweaking to find out which recovered paint could and couldn’t be used, how to mix and treat it, which additives are needed, and which colours we can produce – there are four for now, with more to come.

We worked with Resene to ensure we achieve quality standards which match or exceed their requirements. Our visit to GDB also taught us a lot – as is so often the case with sustainability-focused projects, collaboration and learning from others is key.

The result of all this work is a process which produces the first high-quality, commercially available, remanufactured paint sold in the New Zealand market. It took perseverance, innovation, and resourcefulness, and it’s something we are very proud of.

Why it matters

Being able to create a truly circular solution for a resource as challenging as paint shows the possibility for all kinds of solutions to challenging waste streams.

Paint contains a complex mix of ingredients which serve specific purposes, depending on its application. Remanufacturing it is far more involved than simply mixing the ‘good’ paint together and packaging it up.

Getting to where we are now wasn’t quick or easy, but was definitely worth it. 

What might the future look like?

We’re leading a project with the paint industry and its stakeholders to create a nationwide scheme for all waste paint and its packaging. The aim is not only to meet government requirements around an all-of-industry solution for single-use plastics but to also include the recovery of steel containers and help create innovative uses for unwanted paint.

The Government requirement came about after single-use plastic packaging was declared a ‘priority product’ in 2020, meaning regulated product stewardship schemes had to be set up. This gave the industry the impetus and framework to create a regulated scheme for plastic paint packaging.

The industry has gone beyond what’s required to include the metal packaging and paint itself so higher value solutions can be created for them – something which is to be commended.

Key areas of the scheme being discussed include educating tradies and the public about how to reduce paint and packaging waste, improving reverse logistics through collaboration, standardising return containers, remanufacturing paint into new paint, and the recycling of waste paint and packaging into high value products.

There is currently a working group in place, made up of representatives from the New Zealand industry – from producers and retailers to plastic processors and manufacturers – with three of the five milestones completed. I look forward to seeing where this work leads. 

Dominic works at 3R, which designs, implements and manages 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.