What is actually pushing this?
Four things, and they rarely arrive together.
Solvent emissions and your permit. If your solvent use is high enough, your finishing operation is a permitted activity and your local authority regulates it. Most manufacturers only discover where their ceiling sits when they try to grow. Taking on more work means spraying more, and spraying more means more solvent, so the permit stops being a piece of paper in a drawer and starts being a limit on the order book.
Isocyanates. Two-pack solvent PU systems are hardened with isocyanates. Anyone using them at work has to be trained to use them, and the people around the sprayer are often the ones nobody thought about. Plenty of workshops have a properly protected sprayer and two other people breathing the same air.
Specifiers and customers. Contract work increasingly asks questions about what is on the surface. Nursery and school furniture, healthcare, marine, anything going to tender. Certifications such as Blue Angel are routinely asked for, and a solvent-based system will not hold them.
The people you employ. A workshop that smells of solvent is harder to recruit into than one that does not. This comes up more than it used to, particularly from smaller firms trying to bring younger people in.
Does this mean solvent-based is finished?
No, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something. There are applications where solvent-based remains the better technical answer, and there are workshops where water-based will not currently work at all. What has changed is that water-based is no longer a compromise on finish quality, so the balance of the decision has shifted.
What we would say is that the direction is one way. Nothing in the regulatory landscape is heading back towards higher solvent use, and no customer has ever asked us for a finish with more VOCs in it.
How much difference does it actually make?
The acid-catalysed system we replaced for one customer ran at around 60% VOC content. For comparison, Hesse COOL-TOP, the one-component water-based lacquer we use most, is 2.8%. The two-component PERFECT-TOP is 6.2%.
That is the gap that takes a growing business back under its permit ceiling. The customer in question, a coffin manufacturer heading towards its limit, converted its whole finishing range and came down from around 60% to approximately 3%, which gave it room to carry on expanding.
So is this urgent for me?
It depends entirely on which of the four pressures above you are feeling. If you are near a permit limit or growing fast, it is already urgent. If you are losing work on specification, it is urgent. If none of them apply yet, you have time to do this properly, which is the better way to do it.
The worst version is the one where somebody converts in a hurry because an inspector turned up, without changing the workshop conditions or the equipment, and then concludes water-based does not work.
Interested in reviewing your finishing process?
Get in touch with the Redwood team on 02392 233310 or email [email protected] to arrange an initial conversation.