Sustainability has become a focused effort across the globe. The United Nations has developed 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) to focus society on finding better ways to function that do not negatively affect human health and the planet. The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development was adopted in 2015 to identify specific targets for growth in areas such as educational access, elimination of poverty and hunger, clean energy and water, and the pursuit of global peace.1 As we relate these SDGs to the coatings industry, it is clear that we can impact the success of these global initiatives. The coatings industry can address sustainability by focusing on environmental preservation, responsible consumption and production of materials, and the reduction of negative impacts our products can have on human health. High-performance coatings are an essential tool to extend the life of metal assets in many industries including transportation, utilities, manufacturing, and national defense. Corrosion protection is achieved by utilizing a high-performance, multi-layer coatings system, which predominantly includes a primer containing heavy-metal corrosion inhibitors. Direct-to-metal mono-coat systems are also becoming popular to achieve multiple performance attributes in one coat, including corrosion resistance.
Congruently, the annual cost of corrosion is estimated to be $2.5 trillion, which equates to 3.4% of the global GDP, according to the 2013 NACE economic impact study.2 This fact exemplifies protective coatings as an essential need in the global migration to sustainable living. Metal protective coatings vary in performance requirements and regulatory restrictions and are dominated by solventborne technology. Pressure to reduce dependence on solventborne systems is growing, however. Likewise, historical use of corrosion inhibitors based on chromium, lead, and zinc chemistries has brought great benefit to coating performance, but at a detriment to the environment and human health. Advances in technology have produced alternatives containing no heavy metals that maintain coating performance.