Impact Report 21:22 - Flipbook - Page 12
2.
Paint – a story as old as time
Against the ‘benefits’ there
are a range of disbenefits with
the switch away from natural
ingredients
Pollution:
The cracking process requires very
high temperatures and so plastics
are incredibly carbon intensive
to produce. Every year in the UK
we import thousands of tonnes
of shale gas from the US to form
the plastic beads that, with a raft
of chemical processing shown
in Diagram 1, become synthetic
resins.
Put simply, paint drives climate change
For every litre of modern paint that
is manufactured a larger amount
of waste is created.
In the UK alone each year the
paint industry creates over 50,000
tonnes of hazardous waste (that is
2,000,000 litres sent to landfill).
Every day that people rinse their
paint brushes or rollers under the
tap they are flushing plastics and
chemicals down the drain. Many
are no doubt unaware of this,
believing that water based paints
can be harmlessly washed off with
water.
Put simply, paint pollutes our rivers and our soils.
In the UK it is now thought that up
to 180,000 tonnes of microplastics
from paint end up in the oceans
every year – 6 times more than
from cosmetics. Microbeads are
banned in cosmetics, surely they
should be banned in paint?
Put simply, paint pollutes the oceans
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