Sustainability ScoreCards have been developed to allow the sustainability impact of paints to be easily assessed by the paint industry.
The paper introduces sustainability ScoreCards to demonstrate the reasoning between the different data that has been included and the benefits that ScoreCards can offer the paint industry.
The data includes embodied CO2e, embodied water, CO2e downstream, lining consumption, durability, product hazard, chemical safety, and VOC content. The usefulness of the information this data provides will be reviewed, along with how the ScoreCards can be used to benchmark the sustainability of different systems allowing a quantified sustainability decision to be made.
Using a paint system approach, calculated by area, gives improved insight to the applied system, and makes it easier to use in the paint industry, compared to individual product declarations based on weight of products. ScoreCards are also significantly quicker and cheaper to produce than EPDs, making them a more realistic document to produce for a paint company that may have hundreds of different paints that can result in thousands of different system permeations.
Sustainability is a key element of business strategy today, but when you get down to applying tank linings it is not necessarily easy for a linings end user to measure how sustainable the project is or to identify what steps can be taken to improve the sustainability of the project. Lining Systems Sustainability ScoreCards provide everyone in the paint contract chain transparency on the environmental impact of the lining.
Environmental Product Declarations (EPD) are available, but they are focused on the infrastructure market and in particular green buildings, whereas tank linings are more commonly used in the energy industry, in particular the hydrocarbon process and storage markets. EPDs focus on the product in the pail. Sustainability ScoreCards focus on applied systems and can easily be used for multilayer and multiproduct systems and also include surface preparation and application.
The ScoreCards can be used to inform and compare how different linings and linings systems have different environmental impact and provide quantitative data to allow informed choices.
From this understanding of the sustainability impact of the linings system all stakeholders in the tank lining project can make informed decisions and align with the sustainability expectations of the stakeholders. The sustainability ScoreCards give quantitative data which can be used to benchmark different linings systems with regard to their environmental impact.
The Sustainability ScoreCards can also guide future new product development projects which can include targets to create more sustainable solutions to the issues faced in tank lining projects.
