Coil Coated Metal: The Green Alternative
Prepainted Metal Provides Multidimensional Environmental Benefits
Using prepainted metal in the manufacture of products provides environmental benefits on many levels.
First, prepainted metal helps reduce landfill deposits. Tests have shown that prepainted metal products can have a longer service life, and often are up to 100 percent recyclable at the end of their service life. That means recycled prepainted metal is transformed into a new product instead of contributing to the volumes of waste in overburdened landfills. The steel or aluminum used in prepainted metal is often made of fully or partially recycled metal in the first place, creating a beneficial cycle.
Another green benefit inherent in prepainting is the process itself. By centralizing paint operations from many locations to high-tech coil coating lines, a host of green benefits are realized. The coil coating industry has pioneered controlled processes that focus on reducing VOC emissions, lowering energy use with efficient curing processes, and maximizing resources usage.
For companies who ship products overseas, prepainted metal helps take the hassles out of compliance regulations like the European Union’s RoHS directive. Prepainted metal allows for products to be more easily designed, engineered and brought to market while adhering to increasingly strict environmental standards, even abroad.
The coil coating process is the method of choice for today’s most advanced metal coatings, producing even additional green benefits. For example, “cool metal roofing” systems feature coatings specifically designed to reflect heat, helping to reduce energy needs and mitigate environmental problems like Urban Heat Islands and smog. The latest state-of-the-art architectural coatings are applied using the coil coating process as well. These include new self-cleaning, smog-eating coatings for buildings; solar panels coatings; and color-changing coatings that help store and reflect heat.
In addition, products manufactured from prepainted metal do not “leach” or emit harmful substances into the air, an important benefit for indoor consumer goods.
