High Performance Coating Materials from Recycled Sources

By Gary E. Spilman, Mike Christy, Brian Comstock-Reid

Environmental, health, and safety concerns continue to drive awareness and interest toward improving the sustainability of materials used in the coatings industry.¹ This is a subset of the larger movement toward becoming better stewards of global resources across all industries and working toward building a circular economy.

To that end, this article discusses a nonpetroleum, non-bio resource for producing high performance industrial coatings resins. Alongside, and in harmony with current biobased efforts, Resinate has introduced commercial polyols that are designed to contain high levels of recycled materials. Previous presentations and publications² introduced some of the descendants from recycled PET.

Resinate now introduces multi-functional materials as base resins or blend additives, which are based on polycarbonate streams. Ultimately, these novel polyols provide a green chemistry alternative to heavy metal corrosion pigments, are nontoxic, can be added during the letdown stage of coating production, and can enhance other coating performance properties. This research compares performance in two separate formulated coating systems, and demonstrates the utility of these materials for metal protective coatings.