Important tips for dealing with paint.
One important way in which paint impacts the environment happens during or after the painting process. It is also important to protect the environment when cleaning your brushes. Follow the steps below:
- Use a kitchen roll to clean the paint from your brush as thoroughly as possible. Then put the used kitchen roll in the jar containing leftover paint.
- When it comes to non-water-soluble paint, such as conventional oil or alkyd paint, a solvent can be used to clean your brush (for example white spirit) in a jar that seals well. The solvent can be used for a long time if the jar is properly closed. Make sure to add a label with the text "Turpentine" and if possible, you can also include the appropriate safety label. Safety first! After some time, take the closed jar to a collection point for small chemical waste.
- When it comes to water-soluble paint, first clean the brush as thoroughly as possible by shaking off the paint residue from the bristles in a jar of water with a bit of washing-up liquid. The brush can then be cleaned under the tap. The jar of water can also be used several times. Over time, the paint residue will sink down and the water can then be carefully poured off. You can collect the paint residue in the paint waste jar.
Even with water-soluble paint such as water colours, gouache and acrylic colours, you should never simply clean the brush under the tap or remove the paint residue in the sink.
Small chemical waste
Used up solvents, products containing solvent, and unused paint are all chemical waste. You can help protect the environment by not throwing it away with the household waste, but by collecting it and handing it in to a collection point for small chemical waste. Rinsing it down the sink is always harmful to the environment.
Cobra. Solvent-free painting with oil colours
Royal Talens is a pioneer in the field of oil paint with its Cobra water mixable oil colours that allow you to paint without solvents. You can dilute these pure, professional and study quality oil colours in water, and the brushes can be cleaned with soap and water. There is no longer any need to use harmful solvents that may end up in wastewater. Painting with Cobra is also better for your health.
Environmentally friendly treatment plant
The production of various paint types and quantities also involves a lot of cleaning activities. With an eye to protecting the environment, virtually all our paint boilers and machine parts are cleaned using water and soap instead of solvents.
Since the paint particles are too fine to be filtered out from the water directly, Royal Talens uses a different, smarter method. An ingenious system is used to separate the solid particles from the water. An extensive drainage system runs under the factory. All of the drains flow into a large 80 cubic metre basin that holds all of the wastewater from the factory. A “flocculation process” (the addition of certain chemicals) causes the paint particles to clump together and sink to the bottom. We press this wastewater through a filtering machine, which then leaves only a "cake" of solid particles. This cake is disposed as chemical waste. The filtered water that remains complies with the standards of the water authorities and is allowed into the sewage.
