Painting the future green

Dr Hinkley at work in the laboratory.

Dr Hinkley should know – he is the lead chemist on an IRL/Resene collaborative project to develop waterborne paints based on resins made from sustainable raw materials. A year ago, the proposal won Resene $1 million in R&D services in IRL’s What’s Your Problem New Zealand? competition.

IRL scientists and Resene technical staff have been hard at work since then and are making excellent progress. The team has created a novel binding ingredient – the glue that makes paint stick to a surface – using a polymer derived from a readily available and highly renewable feedstock produced in New Zealand. They will soon be applying for a patent.

“We have generated a novel, derivatised polymer mixture that not only confers properties crucial for a paint binder, but [also] allows laterreactivity in the paint promoting hardening, film forming and other desirable characteristics,” Dr Hinkley says.

We are creating a new ingredient that must utilise simple and readily scaled processes, so it can’t involve complex or costly chemistry. Existing technologies have been around for a long time and are refined to a high level. Ours has to compete with that.

“I thought making drugs was hard until I started trying to make paint! As well as the technical challenges, we are also working in a highly researched and patented field which generates a whole new set of headaches.”

Dr Hinkley says there are still significant hurdles to overcome before production and commercialisation are underway. These include two critical technical challenges to ensure the material meets the specifications for a paint binder ingredient.

“We also have to make sure our ingredient is compatible with all the other things that go into your average pot of paint (there are potentially thousands of individual materials in the finished product). The binder must also be stable in the pot and on the wall, cost effective to produce and economic to export.

“We are ticking these off one by one.”

In 2011, Resene plans to launch a new eco range of paints that use the new ingredient, with the first products expected to be for walls and ceilings.

While the original IRL/Resene collaboration was an 18-month-long project, the partnership will continue with the Foundation for Research, Science and Technology providing funding for a $2.6 million dollar project that will run over the next four years. That project, co-funded by Resene, will allow the team to develop its technology to produce high-performance paints.

Dr Hinkley says the project has been tremendously rewarding and delivered many spin-offs for IRL.

“We have had access to the significant expertise within Resene and some of its international partners. As a result, we’ve learned a huge amount, uncovered a range of techniques and abilities held by our colleagues in IRL, and moved into a whole series of new fields we didn’t realise we had the skills to tackle.”