Through the European Green Deal, we have committed to carbon neutrality by 2050. The green transition is expected to lead to a net reduction of at least 55% in greenhouse gas emissions as early as 2030.

Goals as ambitious as these cannot be reached with just a few big changes; every detail of our lives and business will need to be optimised. Coatings for construction machinery are one of these seemingly small, insignificant things.

An understanding of the current situation is a prerequisite for improvement. The simplest way to assess the environmental impact of any product or process is through the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) method, which evaluates the environmental impact of the product or process over its entire life cycle. In business-to-business operations, which include coatings for construction machinery, it is common and standardised for stakeholders in the value chain to perform a gate-to-gate LCA, taking into account data for the entry of raw materials and services.

One of the published studies on bio-renewable coatings for agricultural and construction machinery.

It has been found that the extraction and production of raw materials is by far the dominant part of coating emissions at the manufacturer’s gate. The coating production process itself and all forms of transportation together have a largely smaller impact on the environment. It is therefore a logical question to ask whether we can use different, more environmentally friendly raw materials.

Generally, the first solution is recycling, reuse of already used raw materials and thus a transition towards a circular economy. In the coatings industry, the reuse of raw materials from already applied products is nearly impossible, and certainly pointless. Separating the coating from the substrate requires more investment than recycling would yield in useful raw materials. However, the coating industry can still transition to a circular economy. The solution is not in the circulation of more or less processed raw materials, but in the use of binders from bio-renewable sources and recycling them through the natural carbon cycle.

At Helios TBLUS, we are striving to improve our environmental performance and build a carbon-neutral future under our “We Turn It Green” initiative.

Many would call this science fiction, but this is not the case. In the past decade, Helios TBLUS has been involved in European projects which have explored the possibility of producing and using coatings made from bio-renewable sources, specifically algae. Of course, it was largely laboratory research at a relatively low technology readiness level (TLR). But the development did not stop at that level.

This year, we presented a study at scientific conferences and in the most important scientific and specialist publications, proving that it is possible to prepare a coating for agricultural and construction machinery made from a binder synthesised in-house from entirely bio-renewable sources. We have shown that such a coating is equivalent in all its properties to a coating made from conventional raw materials obtained from petroleum. We used raw materials which are not derived from food sources and thus do not endanger the supply of food, are safe because they are, like raw materials obtained from petroleum, subject to REACH, and provide a binder which is not biodegradable and is therefore suitable for the harshest exposure conditions. This binder is commercially available.

And the activities in the area of coatings for construction machinery from bio-renewable sources did not end with studies. In regular production, some of our best-selling modern coatings for agricultural and construction machinery use raw materials from (partially) bio-renewable sources, as long as this does not represent a significant increase in costs.

A typical example is the KANSAI PRIMER EP 11-26 epoxy primer, which contains up to 25% carbon from bio-renewable sources in its binder. For other coatings, where the replacement of raw materials would cause a noticeable price change, we offer interested customers special versions of our products with an increased percentage of bio-renewable raw materials. These products were recently presented at the IKI Symposium, organised by KANSAI HELIOS in Köln, Germany.

What about reducing the emissions from coatings in the stages of their life cycle after they leave production? The application of coatings is highly energy-intensive and, in principle, has a high environmental impact. Development activities are also focused on lowering the curing temperature of coatings and thus reducing the energy consumption during the application phase.