Sustainability and furniture coatings - what does the future hold in store? I think that's a good question, since currently the furniture coatings market is still dominated by solventborne systems. On the other hand there are certain factors driving the industry to switch to waterborne solutions.
A few days ago I came in an internet forum across with the question
"why should you use high-troughput?". Spontaneous my thoughts were like:
it's more efficent, it's more straightforward development and so on.
Then I followed a little more the discussion in the forum and found out,
that there seems to be a lot of uncertainty concerning the usefullnes of high-through put.
Find out, what people are discussing.
Leafing through the product news exhibitors of the American Coatings Show 2010 are distributing these days, I'm surprised about the high priority companies are giving to environmentally friendly solutions. Low VOC, sustainability, "green" products, waterborne solutions - these are some of the key words used in almost every article.
USA is going green! Last week I attended the Waterborne Symposium "Advances in Sustainable Coatings Technology" in New Orleans, USA. In addition to the main technical programme (25 papers), the Symposium also included a poster session and a two-day technology showcase consisting of 15 tabletop technical exhibits. Diana P. Strongosky opend the conference with her talk "Going Green Beyond Waterborne Coatings" and statet "beeing less bad is not good enough".
Ulrich Gesenhues comments on the paper "Keep your powder dry" by T. Dinkov and J. Stabryn, which appeared in the January issue of EUROPEAN COATINGS JOURNAL, pp 25-27, and can be read online at http://www.european-coatings.com/raw-materials/pigments/:
Recently, Luis Fernandez, Vice President Dow Coating Materials statet in an interview in FARBE UND LACK , that the improvement of sustainable products is an important R&D activity at Dow, because consumer are asking for such products. This is a quite important point. However, I am wondering how this can be achieved.
I have just had the opportunity to speak with a bunch of experts who belong to the Innovation Alliance Carbon Nanotubes in Germany. At their annual congress I could get an idea of their enthusiasm when it comes to carbon nanotubes (CNT) - a "material of the 21st Century", as the CNT supporters put it.
The news are full of stories about the extrem wintry weather in Europe, at least in northern Europe. One consequence of these weather condtions are delays in traffic operations of railways, (at least in Germany, wher I am a daily victim of these delays)),extreme delays for flights or even cancellations. Now it would be the right time for anti-icing coatings. Just imagine: Aircrafts coated with such functional coatings have no need of de-icing equipment anymore, runways also would be coated by anti-ice coatings. Thus, flight delays would be a problem of yesteryear. There is a lot of research going on, but are there anti-icing coatings available on the market?And how do they perform.
