Professionals · Job solutions
Wasting less paint, less water and less time is the same job. Here is what a painting business can do on site, and what we do at the plant.
Six things that cut waste on a site, every one of which also saves money.
The paint that never gets used is the most expensive and the most wasteful thing on a site. Measure the walls, take the coverage figure off the data sheet and work the litres out before you order; our calculator does it for a room, a floor or a whole building. Order the pack sizes that fit the job rather than rounding up to a drum you will half use.
Laying paint on thicker than the data sheet allows does not make it last longer. It makes it crack, cost more and dry slower. Work to the stated coverage, and spend the time on preparation instead: a properly prepared wall is the single biggest reason a coat lasts, and the longest-lasting coat is the one nobody has to repaint in two years.
Never wash brushes, rollers or trays into a gutter, a drain or onto open ground. Wash into a bucket, let the solids settle overnight, pour the clear water off for the next wash and let the sludge dry out. Water-based paint is easy to handle this way, which is one good reason to use it wherever the specification allows.
Wipe the rim, seal the lid down properly and store part tins upright, out of the sun and off a damp floor. Write the colour, the code and the room on the tin. A labelled half tin is a touch-up kit for the client; an unlabelled one is waste in a year.
Leave empty tins open until any residue has dried hard, then they can go with scrap metal or plastic for recycling rather than to landfill with liquid paint in them. Never pour paint into a drain, a stream or a pit. If you are left with tins of paint you cannot use, ask us before you throw them away.
A safety data sheet tells you how a product should be handled, stored and disposed of, and what to do if it goes somewhere it should not. Ask us for the one covering any product you use, and keep it where the people using the paint can read it.
We make it here. Every tin sold on this site is made at our own plant in Ghana rather than shipped in finished, so the distance between the mill and the wall is a few hours of road instead of an ocean.
We tint to order. Colour is added when you buy rather than guessed at months earlier, so the plant is not left with pallets of a shade nobody wanted. It is also why the colour card can be as large as it is.
We test every batch. Viscosity, opacity and colour match are checked before a batch is filled. A batch that is right the first time is a batch nobody has to dispose of, and it is why a drum bought next year still matches the one on the wall today.
Most of what we sell is water-based. Our emulsions thin and clean up with water, which makes washing up on site a great deal easier to do responsibly than it is with a solvent-borne system.
We are not going to print a badge we have not earned. We do not currently hold a third-party environmental certification, and where a project needs documented environmental data for a submission, ask us and we will tell you exactly what we can and cannot supply for the product in question.
If your specification calls for something we do not yet meet, we would rather hear it than lose the job quietly: it is how the next formulation gets written.
Tell us what the project has to meet and we will tell you what we can document.
