Tony Mash

The coatings industry has made a good start but has further to go on its path of sustainable development. The opportunity for significant progress in the future lies beyond business-as-usual.

The rout in the oil markets of the world is having an impact in every corner of society.

“Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.” (Oscar Wilde)

The concept of sustainability is a broad one and is open to wide interpretation. It is often the case that one can get locked into a particular area of endeavour and miss the bigger picture.

At the end of 2012, this sustainability blog was full of encouragement and optimism about the progress that the coatings industry would make in the following year.

In past blogs, sustainable development in the coatings industry has been linked closely with innovation.

Doing things right or doing the right thing? That’s a question I have heard raised in the context of sustainability as people have sought to identify what exactly is the right path to make our world a truly better and more sustainable place for us and future generations.

I can still recall the smell of solvent-based gloss paint as it dried after application at home.

New sustainable developments that come from ‘left field’

I don’t want to sound alarmist, but I was deeply disturbed by the recent pronouncements from the IPCC. This learned international organisation concluded that the concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere has grown to levels not seen for 3 million years, and that about half of cumulative anthropogenic CO2 emissions between 1750 and 2010 have occurred in the last 40 years.