ERI Home EMS Resources Home Last updated 9/10/03.
As analyzed in the Impacts Risks and Resources document for the Paints and Coatings sector, the manufacture of paints and coatings involves significantly less environmental impact than the subsequent use of the products by the manufacturers' customers. Since the EMS approach is specifically directed toward manufacturing systems, rather than toward questions of product stewardship, it could be argued that an emphasis on providing EMS resources for this sector would be less effective from a cost-benefit standpoint than an equivalent amount of effort directed toward such topics as product reformulation and green marketing.
Like the chemical sector, the paints and coatings industry has developed a voluntary self-certification program called Coatings Care®, in a frank reference to the chemical industry's Responsible Care® program. (There are, in addition, other clones of Responsible Care for other sectors related to the chemical industry. For example, a Frequently Asked Questions document describing the Coatings Care program refers to a Responsible Distribution ProcessSM program of the National Association of Chemical Distributors (NACD).) There appears to be less interest in the paints and coatings manufacturing sector in explicitly linking the self-certification program with third-party standards such as ISO 14001 than there is in the chemical sector. The same document asserts that Coatings Care is "consistent with" standards such as ISO 14001, but does not mention the possibility of combining the two types of certification. In contrast, an offshoot of the Responsible Care program specifically addresses companies that may want to pursue joint certification. It would appear that the pressures brought to bear on chemical suppliers by their customers to become ISO certified have not, or have not as yet, made themselves as strongly felt in the paints and coatings sector. (A search turned up only one company whose operations fell unquestionably in the sector (Valspar) that offered an explicit description of a third-party EMS program, and this was only available from material submitted under the EPA's Performance Track program.)
Customer usage of paints and coatings may in some cases fall under the coatings users' EMS programs, but it is difficult to gauge the extent to which a particular segment of the coatings market falls into this category.
The Coatings Care program appears to be the only option developed so far for manufacturers in this sector. Much of the specific information on the program is restricted to members of the trade organization for paint and coating manufacturers (NPCA). Thus the list of available resources is rather scanty, at least up to this point.