Sustainable Formulations for Coatings

Coating Solutions That Make a Difference

As consumers become more conscious about how their products impact the environment and their health, the priorities of coatings formulators continue to shift. Not only must manufacturers produce paints and coatings that withstand exposure to water, corrosion, abrasion, and other aggressive environmental factors, but they must also consider the impact of their products and processes from a health, safety, and environmental perspective. 

At Syensqo, we enable manufacturers to convert solvent-borne systems to waterborne formulations that meet demanding industry regulations. Aligned with our Syensqo sustainability roadmap, and our focus on increasing the sustainable solutions within our portfolio, we offer an expanding line of APE-free, low-VOC, biobased, and biodegradable solutions, along with Ecolabel products, that meet the most challenging sustainability and performance requirements facing the industry today. 

Sustainable Coatings: Top Product Families 

In keeping with our commitments to the coatings industry, Syensqo offers a growing number of sustainable solutions. Some of our most well-known APE-free and low-VOC formulations include Reactsurf®, Rhodasurf®, Abex® and Aerosol® surfactants, in addition to Rhodoline® functional additives and Sipomer® specialty monomers. Additionally, our specialty resins, such as Diofan® PVDC, Fluorolink® PFPE and Hylar® PVDF offer low-VOC or VOC-free properties for coatings to improve air quality.

Versatile Usages for Sustainable Coatings

Syensqo's versatile solutions help paint and coatings formulators comply with regulatory and sustainability mandates without sacrificing functional performance, supporting the shift toward more durable, safer products that contribute to a healthier environment. 

Durability Enhancement

Syensqo offers a diverse portfolio of solutions that extend the lifetime of architectural and industrial paints and coatings, delivering improvements to water resistance, corrosion resistance, scrub resistance and film hardness, among other functionalities.

Low-VOC/SVOC Coatings

Because volatile organic compounds harm the ozone layer and air quality, the coatings industry seeks to produce more low-VOC and low-SVOC products. Our solutions for the coatings market help formulators limit odor in waterborne coating formulations and contribute to reduced manufacturing carbon footprints.

Conversion to Water-Based Formulations

Linked to demand for products that are free of odors and hazardous emissions, Syensqo offers solutions that enable formulators to switch from solvent-borne to waterborne formulations.

APE-Free Coatings

Sustainability initiatives across the globe have led coatings manufacturers to remove harmful chemicals like alkylphenol ethoxylates from their products. Our APE-free offerings allow manufacturers to convert to APE-free formulations with drop-in solutions providing like-for-like performance when compared to APE-based products. Common applications of our APE-free solutions include emulsion polymers, paint formulations, colorants, and other uses, such as paper coatings, inks, non-wovens, and adhesives.  

Carbon Footprint Reduction

Formulators around the world have made it a priority to reduce their carbon footprint and strive for carbon neutrality in line with the Paris Agreement targets. Syensqo offers a long line of Ecolabel products that are highly effective in small quantities, which can help formulators manufacture low- to emission-free paints and coatings.

Biobased Solutions

Our portfolio includes partially biobased solutions that substitute fossil-based feedstock with renewable, non-food-competing feedstocks. These biobased additives provide the same functionality and comparable performance as their fossil-based counterparts, supporting customers seeking to increase the renewable content of end products without making trade-offs.

Biodegradable Solutions

We offer biodegradable solutions for emulsion polymerization, paints, and coatings that help our customers meet end-of-life material management requirements.

We recognize that sustainability is just talk unless it is backed by action. For this reason, we can provide life cycle analyses (LCAs) for our products, which help our customers make fact-based decisions when selecting coating additives through a holistic approach to understanding potential environmental and health issues. 

When carrying out an LCA, we define the impacts of our products across different dimensions:

• Global warming
• Acidification
• Ozone depletion
• Eutrophication
• Toxicity
• Water depletion
• Among others

Performing LCAs on our products allows us to:

• Improve product development
• Choose better materials and design features that lead to more sustainable products and technologies
• Provide information that guides us to make more sustainable purchasing decisions