Robert Wendoll has been elected to a leadership position in a multinational group that sponsors and coordinates atmospheric research related to the development of air-quality policies.

LOS ANGELES — Robert Wendoll, director of Environmental Affairs for Dunn-Edwards Corp., has been elected to a leadership position in a multinational group that sponsors and coordinates atmospheric research related to the development of air-quality policies.

Wendoll, a leading coatings-industry proponent of science-based regulatory policies in the area of air-quality issues, has been elected co-chairman of the North American Research Strategy for Tropospheric Ozone (NARSTO). Wendoll, who succeeds Howard Feldman of the American Petroleum Institute, was elected to a two-year term.

A research panel within the NARSTO organization is actively engaged in the study of air-quality issues directly related to regulations affecting paint, coatings, solvents, and consumer products. The panel, the Reactivity Research Working Group, or RRWG, is examining the issue of “relative reactivity” of VOCs in coatings. The relative-reactivity concept is based on evidence that individual VOCs vary greatly in their propensity to react with other atmospheric compounds to generate ground-level ozone pollution, or smog.

A related issue has been termed “atmospheric availability,” which is defined as the extent to which any given VOC may become available in the atmosphere to participate in ozone-forming reactions.

“Our hope is that future regulatory policies acknowledging reactivity and availability criteria will be far more efficient than current mass-based regulations,” Wendoll said.

Dunn-Edwards, Los Angeles, is a major regional manufacturer and distributor of architectural coatings in California and several other western states. The company is a strong supporter of NARSTO’s VOC-reactivity research program. NARSTO is a public-private research consortium involving the governments of the United States, Canada and Mexico, and also includes representatives of industry, academia and private research groups.