Paint your business green with sustainable innovation
Innovation is famously described as one per centinspiration and 99 per cent perspiration – great ideas are rarely enough, the challenge is to execute them.
Sustainable innovation can be a time-consuming and sometimes frustrating process. Our latest report Paint the Town Greenhas been more than three years in the making but what a story we have to tell.
The report is about a multi-year innovation collaboration which set the goal of creating sustainable paint systems, and about the new products, services and processes which came out of it. It explains how to conduct innovation driven by environmental and social responsibility and why it makes good business sense.
Its not that I’m especially excited by paint – though I must confess to a soft spot after working on it for so long. Essentially the report shows how to use sustainability as a new lens to reinvent and rethink every aspect of our life. If we can do this with paint, imagine what you can do with cars, mobile phones, homes and holidays.
The three-year project set out to study the entire lifecycle of paint – from raw materials through to manufacturing, use and disposal - to find ways to make it more sustainable. It brought together ICI Paints AkzoNobel, a manufacturer and supplier, construction group Carillion, a major user of paint, and Forum for the Future.
Here are a few of the innovations:
Dulux Ecosense, a new range of eco-paint with half the carbon and water footprint of the standard paint sold two years ago and 40 per centless waste.Improved cans which use less plastic and are easier to clean and recycle.A recycling scheme in which vehicles delivering paint to Dulux Decorator Centres bring back used cans.Envirowash - a mobile brush and roller cleaning station for building sites: instead of pouring contaminated water down the drains it is captured for reuse with the paint residue filtered out.Manufacturing improvements that save millions of litres of water used in cleaning production equipment by using it to make new paint.
We also developed new tools for the project like our Streamlined Lifecycle Assessment (SLCA) methodand Environmental Impact Analyser – a tool to measure the key impacts of a proposed new formulation and compare them against an existing product. This was the key which allowed ICI Paints AkzoNobel to develop both Ecosense and Ecosure trade paint, which won Green Product of the year in the Green Business Awards 2009.
Paint the Town Green marks a unique point in Forum’s innovation work. Some years ago we resolved to only work on practical innovation projects and not write any reports. We caved in on this project, but that’s only because we’re convinced there’s a great story we want to share with others. We hope it provides the one per centinspiration you’ve been looking for.
Comments
This is a fantastic project, well done Forum Innovation team!
I only have one question:
How will these real improvements be communicated to the general public/the consumer via their packaging or displays in DIY stores?
I know that if I did not know about this project and when visiting my local DIY store I saw Dulux Ecosense, I would feel somewhat suspicious about whether the product really lived up to its name.
From your report, I see there is a short three bullet explanation on the tin, but had you also considered having some kind of certification or endorsement (even putting Forum logo as one) in order to show the consumer that this is a geniunely more sustainable product? Or otherwise in some way finding an opportunity to indicate the depth into which the project considered all the issues along the lifecycle.
It comes back to education of the consumer again, and indeed in this case, the professional painter/decorator. From my own experience professional painters will probably know very little about ecological paints, will be suspicious of their results, and might need some explanation as to why to use them instead of the conventional paints. This could be an interesting addition to the Paint the Town Green project...
...Teach to Paint the Town Green. :)
Hi Jo
Its a good question. There is some communication of the benefits i.e. green claims on the tin, though most of the supporting material around verification of this to ensure trust, which is I think what you are talking about, is in supporting material via instore leaflets and online. You can, for instance, find reference to Forum's involvement through the development of the impact analyser online here: http://www.dulux.co.uk/advice/environment/environmental_choices.jsp. Given that we developed the tool and were involved in assessments and calculations we are of course supportive. The only other 3rd party form of verification I know of for paint would be the EU eco label. Its a good way to do it, but we think there are other ways too like verifying your method or your assessments, which ICI/Dulux did here. We don't have any plans or ambitions for Forum to be communicated directly to consumers, mostly as we don't have a high recognition with consumers and our target is businesses and opinion formers. Thanks for the feedback,
Chris Sherwin
Head of Innovation
Hats off to the team who prepared this excellent report!
This is one of the most visionary and well documented case studies I have read about the sustainable innovation process (up there with Interface). I intend to show this to clients as one of the best roadmaps available to pursuing a sustainable product development.
The profuse illustrations throughout give a real concrete feel for your thought processes and outcomes.
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