We recognise that our hobby is not exactly the most environmentally friendly, everything from spray can primers to enamel thinners. While it might seem that we all have a small thing such as one primer spray can, when you multiply that up with the millions of people who engage in the world of miniature and scale model painting, it quickly starts to add up to become a bit of a problem.
Realising this, we decided to try and make our product and environmentally friendly as possible, not just from a manufacturing perspective, but also from a personal perspective as well.
PLASTIC REDUCTION
Where ever we can, we try to reduce the amount of plastic we use in our production methods, from the paint itself to the packaging we use.
We are also pushing more emphasis on utilising and purchasing refill bottles for our paints instead of selling another bottle that would be destined for the bin. By purchasing a refill, not only do you save money, but the bottle can be easily cleaned and popped into the recycling.
Our paint bottles are made from PET with the nozzle being made from LDPE.
Our refill bottles are made from HDPE.
Our Soap+ containers are made from Polypropylene.
Our packaging bags are made from LDPE.
RENEWABLE ENERGY
We made a change in early 2021 where we found an energy provider that only sourced their energy from renewable resources making our paint greener than Ork skin!
ULTRA BORING PACKAGING
While a fancy box is nice to receive your products in, how many of us actually keep that box for anything?
By simplifying the packaging and keeping it to the bare essentials, we reduce the carbon footprint by a considerable amount since it doesn't have fancy graphics that require inks that have to be transported to the printing factory as well the energy required to produce them.
Anything that we do print though in house, we use inks that can easily be recovered downstream in the recycling process by using pigment based ink rather than dye based ink, the latter being harder, if not impossible to recover.
WATER RECOVERY
Every time we make paint, we need to clean the equipment afterwards and the waste water produced would normally have to be transported away to be processed. In 2019 we brought this process in house to reduce our carbon footprint.
By taking the waste water and adding a simple chemical mix to it, we're able to recover about 98% of the water we use, the other 2% being lost through natural evaporation while the remaining paint sludge dried out.
This paint sludge is then dried and ground up to be used as basing material giving it a second life.
This means we have a wastage factor of less than 1% with our paint production and, in 2020, only used a total of 15 liters of water to clean all the equipment for a full year.
CLEAN AIR PRODUCTS
Since our foundation, we have used only Zero-VOC or Low-VOC products to ensure that we have a line of products that do not affect the air we breathe. In 2019 we fully changed to Zero-VOC products meaning that all our products do not contribute to air pollution, both indoors and outdoors.