7 Good Things to Know about Recycling Powder Coatings

By Brian Spicer

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You know how the powder coating process works. Charged powder particles are attracted to a metal part on a conveyor or rack, the parts are moved into an oven where the coating is cured. But have you thought about the powder particles that miss the part? The overspray powder you’ve been sending to the landfill has more value and versatility than you think.

Overspray makes up approximately 40% of the powder coating purchased in our industry1. In other words, powder coating applicators only get value for an estimated 60% of what they purchase. Overspray maintains the same quality as new virgin powder coatings, yet it’s typically sent to a landfill.

Today, powder coatings make up approximately 30% of all industrial coatings and, as the market grows, so will the associated waste stream. It is estimated that two billion pounds of powder coating overspray are sent to global landfills each year.

It doesn’t have to continue this way. Powder manufacturers and applicators will always require virgin raw materials and new batches of powder coatings for their operations, and sure, it’s convenient to dispose of overspray, but there are more sustainable, responsible, and economical ways to deal with this material.

Although powder coating recycling has been around for a while, emerging technologies offer significant benefits to both our industry and the environment, creating circular economies, efficiencies, and cost savings.

What should you know about this emerging segment of our industry? Here are seven things to consider:

1. Industry collaboration sparked our technology.
At Surplus Coatings in the Grand Rapids, MI, area, Dwayne Behrens has been collecting overspray since . I joined him in . Before Dwayne and I co-founded Innovakote in , we had outlets that could use recycled overspray for textiles and decking, but those outlets were minimal. We decided they weren’t enough, and we wanted to do more.

We’d been honing our technology and process for years. With incentives from the state of Michigan, we brokered recycled overspray overseas, especially in China, from –. When trade with China shut down due to new regulations in , Dwayne and I traveled overseas to learn best practices from our partners. We took what we learned and combined it with knowledge gained through our own experiences at Surplus Coatings, and we started to build a plan.

When we founded Innovakote, we added Matt Johnson to our team. Matt, who has three decades of experience in the office furniture industry, became our technical and operations director. He helped us build systems and refine our recycling technology so we could repeatedly make the same product again and again. We joined the class of The Heritage Group Accelerator powered by Techstars, which helped us to scale up and prepare for a funding round. Now we’re actively working to supply 100% recycled powder coatings to major corporations in the office furniture industry.

2. Powder coatings can be more environmentally friendly than you thought.
In general, powder coatings are more sustainable than solvent-based coatings, but the raw materials used to make virgin coatings must be mined from the earth, refined, and transported. This manufacturing of virgin powder emits greenhouse gases. In addition, sourcing components like resins makes our industry dependent on foreign suppliers. All good reasons to use recycled powder coatings.

Matt has built his career around doing just that. He started out on the liquid side of the coatings business. “It was a dirty job and breathing the solvent fumes wasn’t what I wanted to do in a long-term career,” he says. Matt took a leave of absence to study overseas. When he returned, PPG was in the process of starting up a powder coating lab and manufacturing facility, and he volunteered to be part of that startup. “Powder coatings have low VOCs (volatile organic compounds). I’ve enjoyed making my career in an industry that’s gentle on the environment in comparison to liquid solvent-based coatings.”

Recycling powder coatings has an estimated 90%2 smaller greenhouse gas footprint than the process of producing virgin coatings. With our recycling process, we can get more value out of powder coatings. Since our raw material is already a finished powder coating, it takes minimal energy to process it into a finished good.

3. Overspray and baghouse fines aren’t junk.
In addition to the benefits of recycling overspray, we see other opportunities to help powder coating manufacturers.

The process of manufacturing and grinding powder coatings creates fine-sized particles known as “baghouse fines.” We’ve developed a process to help manufacturers recycle this material, too.

Between applicators and manufacturers, there’s a significant opportunity to capture the inherent value of these waste streams. Both overspray and baghouse fines hold value, and our processes help mine that value instead of throwing it away.

Sounds great. So why aren’t more people doing it? “Recycled powder coatings have an image problem,” Dwayne says. “In our industry, when something is perceived as lower quality, manufacturers known for high-quality products don’t want to be associated with it. But they don’t realize that 100% recycled coatings actually are high quality. The materials have already passed manufacturers’ tests. We’re just making quality materials usable once more.”

4. The recycling process ensures quality.
Our team has been perfecting our process to meet the specifications of clients with tight quality, color, and durability requirements. Matt is the man behind the curtain. A 37-year powder coating industry veteran, he draws upon his experience as an hourly employee, a manager, a vice president, and a director of operations at large companies in the industry.

Twenty-five years ago, while at IVC, Matt developed a process for recycling powder coatings as a cost-saving measure, but it was never promoted outside of the office furniture industry. Back then, most manufacturing companies didn’t want to be associated with recycling, but recycling doesn’t have to be a dirty word any longer.

How does the process work? “In essence, we’re remelting and regrinding extruded overspray back into a standard particle size,” Matt says. “We blend singular chemistry materials together using various colors to create a color match. The quality is already within the powder. We are minimally refining it. All the inherent qualities of the original material are still there.”

Dwayne notes that, if we recycled the same material over and over again, the performance and appearance properties would degrade, but that’s not what we do. We recycle all of an applicator’s overspray, which is mainly made up of virgin powder coatings.

Innovakote’s team tests all of the materials it develops and manufactures. Applicators and third-party labs verify that the recycled materials’ quality holds up. “I’ve taken overspray material and reprocessed it six times by itself to see how much the material degrades,” Matt says. “Surprisingly, it maintains a high percentage of its performance. Our process has a lot to do with that.” To create our 100% recycled product, we developed processes and systems to segregate, audit, sample, blend, and test coatings to ensure they meet customer specifications.

5. Powder coating recycling is not a threat. It fills a void.
Though recycling companies like ours are making significant strides, powder coating recycling likely will remain a relatively small percentage of the business. “We’ll never be a sole supplier of powder coating,” Dwayne says. “Our process will never replace traditional powder manufacturers. We’re the conduit that helps manufacturers and applicators become more sustainable.”

To some degree, that’s already happening. One of our customers has a goal that, by , 50% of the goods it produces will include recycled content. There are business as well as environmental reasons for such goals.

“On the customer side of the office furniture industry, designers and architects seeking LEED certification ask about the percentage of recycled material in products,” Dwayne says. “People are scored against each other and, if a company scores higher on social or environmental aspects, it’s more likely to get the job.”

6. It saves money.
Recycled powder coatings cost an average of 50% less than traditional virgin product. You’ll likely pay on average about $3.50 per pound for virgin product and about $1.80 for a pound of recycled powder coating. The cost is slightly lower for non-visual applications and slightly higher for class A finishes3.

When you use recycled powder coatings, the secret to success lies in knowing where to use them. You can put recycled powder coating products to work if you’re willing to consider:

• Gray scale, from white to black.
• Earth tones.
• Rough and textured finishes.
• Simple, common chemistries (polyester TGIC and epoxy/polyester hybrid).

7. Lean practices have made it more difficult.

Talk to anyone in the performance coatings industry in North America, and they will probably start talking about the AAMA specs pretty quickly.

What are they, and why do coatings experts talk about it so much?

Originally, AAMA was an acronym for the American Architectural Manufacturers Association. The association changed its name a few years ago – it’s now the FGIA: Fenestration and Glazing Industry Alliance. 

They created a whole variety of voluntary specifications – testing and performance requirements - for many different aspects of the architectural manufacturing world. They kept the name of their specifications as the AAMA specs as they are so widely used.

Three Specifications for the Coatings Industry

There are three specifications that apply to the coatings industry: AAMA , AAMA , and AAMA .

It’s probably important to point out here that these three coatings specs are for all coatings. For many years, liquid coatings have talked about the AAMA coating specs, and so people often incorrectly associate them with liquid coatings only. In fact, they are for all high-performance coatings, and so they apply to both liquid (think liquid PVDF paint) and superior-performance architectural grade powders (think FEVE Fluoropolymers).

Anodized is not included in these particular specifications, as anodizing actually changes the substrate itself, so it is referred to as a ‘finish,’ and there are separate AAMA specifications for anodizing (e.g., AAMA 611).

So what are these specifications all about, and why are they important to both coaters and the design community?

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Measurement of Performance Capability of Coatings

Simply put, they will give you a very good idea of the performance capability of the coating. Each spec requires a certain number of chemical, mechanical, and weathering tests to be performed and lays out minimum performance requirements for each.

As you move up through the coating specifications, the tests become longer and stricter.

So, what type of tests are we talking about? Some of the most important tests AAMA requires are in the below table. There are actually around 20 tests in total, but these are some of the most telling.

Check out the test and how it varies between the various AAMA specifications. 

AAMA AAMA AAMA Chemical resistance Same Humidity resistance (ASTM D or ASTM D/M) hrs; Few blisters hrs; Blisters size 8 hrs; Blisters size 8 Salt spray resistance (ASTM G85) hrs; 1-2mm creepage; Blisters size 8 hrs; 1-2mm creepage; Blisters size 8 hrs; 1-2mm creepage; Blisters size 8 Florida Exposure 1 year 5 years 10 years Color retention “Slight change” Delta E <5 Delta E <5 Gloss retention “Slight change” Minimum 30% Minimum 50%

As you can see, as you move up through the specifications, tests like corrosion and weathering require more and more from the coating.

So, which powder products will meet these coating specifications?

Making sure you get the right product performance for your application is important. Here’s what you should expect.

AAMA

IFS 300SP is the IFS Standard Polyester that will meet and exceed the performance requirements of AAMA . As the weathering requirements of AAMA allow a “slight change” in the color and gloss (not very specific.), we normally recommend these powders for interior uses where weathering or exterior conditions are not really a factor. They do sometimes get used on the exteriors of low-value residential projects – items like windows, fixtures, fittings, etc. – but for general purposes, regard them as a good all-round interior grade powder.

AAMA

IFS 400SD is the IFS Super Durable Polyester that will meet and exceed the performance requirements of AAMA . The testing requirements, including weathering, are much stricter than the requirements, with exact performance parameters (as you can see, the weathering requirement is five times that of the standard polyester). For this reason, super durables are regarded as good exterior grade powders that are often used on windows, doors, and especially on applications like commercial storefronts. Super durables come with a 10-year warranty when applied by a registered applicator to aluminum – great for storefronts where the chance of the same store being in place in 20 years is unsure, but a robust 10-year performance is ideal. 

AAMA

IFS 500FP is the IFS FEVE-based Fluoropolymer that will meet and exceed the performance requirements of AAMA . The testing requirements are stricter than the performance requirements, with weathering testing being double that of the spec. For this reason, Fluoropolymers are regarded as an excellent high-performance exterior grade powder. They are almost always used solely on exterior applications and are used on curtain walls and façades, windows, doors, etc., on monumental buildings, high-value residential, stadiums, malls, hospitals, government buildings, and more. Fluoropolymers come with a 20-year warranty when applied by a registered applicator to aluminum. If you want a liquid comparison – think 70% PVDF paint. Most powder manufacturers require you to be a registered applicator to buy and apply fluoropolymer powder.

In actual fact, the AAMA specifications are a great way to specify any performance coating – no matter whether it’s powder or liquid; stating the AAMA spec level gives you an absolute minimum that must be met and stops a contractor from simply getting any “powder coating” or “paint” in the right color, regardless of performance.

For more information, talk to your IFS architectural coatings rep: 

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