Biobased Coatings – Collaboration at the Intersection of Innovation Ecology, and Economics

By Cynthia Gosselin

In the past several years, many in-depth articles have been written across the industry heralding a wide variety of advances
suggesting that biobased materials were on the verge of achieving explosive growth.Some of these coatings manufactured
from “natural” or ecofriendly sources are commercial and manufacturing success stories. Yet, many other developments and
advancements are still waiting for the right resin, application, or manufacturing opportunity to manifest itself.
In 2019, an in-depth look at the role that academia plays in successfully making coatings “benign by design” hinted that success
in mass utilization of biobased coatings must include a several pronged industry-wide approach. Following up on those observations, this
article further examines today’s biobased coatings world from the perspective of sustainability, standardization and industry/
government/university collaboration as a basis for progress moving forward. Since the turn of the century, every industry
has made efforts to some extent to build sustainability into their product portfolios with varying degrees of success. Recycling was
one of the initial movements to gain traction. Simply put, if things could be reused or reinvented as a new use, less would end
up in the burgeoning landfills—sort of like hand-me-downs of previous generations, but on a much wider scale.
Over the past 20 years, sustainability has evolved into a much more complex paradigm with four main pillars encom-
passing human, social, economic, and environmental interactions. Together, these four pillars intertwine
to personify sustainability defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “the avoidance of the depletion of natural resources in order
to maintain an ecological balance.” Merriam-Webster further describes sustainability as “a method of harvesting or using a resource so
that the resource is not depleted or permanently damaged.”