A great scientist and awesome futurist Buckminster Fuller famously said: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
We have talked about our approach as utilizing ancient technologies to create a better paint for the modern world. While this is true, what is so completely unique in our approach is that we had to ultimately redefine the standard of clean and healthy in regards to paint, which no one thought possible.
The impossible is creating paint from a material health perspective to have negligible effects on your indoor air quality or TVOC without using acrylic as the primary binder and still be a high performing, durable, and easy to use product. Mineral paints have been around for a while but no one could achieve the performance and ease of use that acrylic could without petrochemicals.
Acrylic manufacturers in the industry keep trying to make their current products cleaner and healthier, but they are not solving the issue that the industry is dependent on petroleum and fossil fuels. They are not looking for a new solution and they are not willing to build a new model. The fear is the product will not perform, it’s a costly investment, and a complete market shift (why fix something that isn’t broke mentality), but this dependence on petrochemicals creates an inherent inability to make the product truly clean and healthy.
It is similar to the automotive industry. You have pioneers who disavow the fuel combustion engine working to create zero emission vehicles, others who develop hybrids, and those who, for convenience and market pressures, work with the existing technology adding only technical improvements to increase fuel mileage. Often car manufacturers will develop technical and safety improvements, creating good products that appeal to eco-conscious consumers, but these defer the key issues of resolving problems with fossil fuels in regards to human and planetary health.
The same issue is almost identical to paint development and manufacturing. Acrylic paint manufacturers work on technological solutions to create lower emission paints but they still contain 50-70% copolymer and acrylic content to adhere to modern surfaces. Unfortunately, this content creates toxicity and is detrimental to the environment.
Since the development of acrylic polymers in the late 1950’s, no acrylic paint company has been able to pioneer a zero toxic emission vehicle to apply color for architectural coatings.
We looked beyond the current technology and standards for acrylic paint and decided that if ancient paint technologies could do no harm to the planet and human health, then we could create products today to do the same thing without sacrificing performance, durability, or ease of use that consumers demand. By using a mineral based technology, we have built a new model.