Sustainable options for paints through a life cycle assessment method

In recent years, the paint industry has addressed the development of products, technologies, and packaging to build conditions to improve environmental performance in accordance to the circular economy goals. For these reasons, a life cycle thinking approach allows for the understanding of the most important steps for pursuing closed-loop strategies and related goals. This paper provides a twofold analysis: first, a comparison of two paints, characterised by different chemical compositions, has been carried out according to the current production cycle (baseline scenario); second, for each product, two additional and alternative scenarios have been hypothesised. These scenarios focus on the use of waste paint blended with virgin paint, and the use of a high rate of recycled inputs of packaging materials. The aim is first to assess the environmental impacts of the life cycles of the paints and identify feasible measures to reduce these impacts. The second aim is to choose the better option between scenarios, according to a circular economy approach. The results highlight that the production and supply of raw materials have the greatest impact on both paints, for all impact indicators. Consequently the use of waste paint reduces environmental impacts by roughly 48%, on average. Furthermore, the packaging options allow us to determine that the use of 50% recycled polypropylene had a better environmental performance than 100% recycled aluminium, although the contribution of packaging is negligible in the total impact indicators. Confirming the results, the sensitivity analysis on the waste paint use has been undertaken.