Solventborne alkyds continue to be widely used due to their balance of application and film performance attributes. Many resin suppliers have developed waterborne alkyds, dispersions or emulsions, but all have fallen short of solventborne performance. Performance gaps include dry time, gloss, adhesion, corrosion and humidity resistance. Low-VOC regulations continue to drive the alkyd market away from traditional solventborne alkyds. Exempt solvents have helped to extend their usefulness, but waterborne alkyd technology has failed to fill the gap on performance requirements for low-VOC coatings. Polynt has developed novel technology that bridges this performance gap, offering fast dry and excellent corrosion at near-zero VOC. This DTM alkyd emulsion closes the performance gap seen with current waterborne alkyd technologies and allows the paint formulator the opportunity to develop high-performance waterborne alkyd paint at near-zero VOC.
Use of solventborne alkyds continues to decrease 2% each year due to environmental concerns and the need for lower-VOC coatings. KNG predicted the use of solventborne alkyds would decrease from ~859 MM pounds in 2011 to ~781 MM pounds by 2016.1 Waterborne alkyd consumption has been growing and was forecast to grow 3% per year, from ~49 MM pounds in 2011 to 55.5 MM pounds in 2016. However, the growth of 6.5 MM pounds of waterborne alkyds does not replace the decline of ~78 MM pounds during that same five-year period. Thus, solventborne alkyds are being replaced by other low-VOC technology (most likely acrylic latex resins) much faster than with waterborne alkyds. Due to current performance shortcomings of alkyd resins in the marketplace, we believe that accelerated growth of waterborne alkyds could be achieved through improved performance.