Revista Paint & Pintura - Edição 243

CLIPPING innovating with each passing day and adding properties to the pro- ducts in which they are used. People are in the market for mostly for products featuring high abrasion resistance for formulated paints, combined with water resistance and a wide range of applications to reduce complexity in production processes. “In the short term, we have determined that customers continue looking for innovative solutions that combine high performancewhile providingmore value for money in today’s formulations by, for example, increasing the final yield of the paints and coatings they use. Now, for the medium and long terms, however, we believe dispersions that promote new attributes will gain more traction, adding value to paints and coatin- gs by developing such properties and early rain resistance and dirt pick-up resistance, while also addressing sustainability concerns by using rawmaterials from renewable sources,” says BASF Dispersions chemist Caroline Reggiani. Innovations are welcome indeed, but the cost of new technologies must be weighed by manufacturers as well in any new development, especially in the decorative paint segment, according to Alene Kita, technical service andmarketingmanager at Lubrizol for LatinAmerica. “We’ve recently found substantial performance enhancements in the development of water-based formulations for systems requiring performance, such as industrial coatings, although the application of water-based systems in these kinds of coatings is still limited to niche markets. When there’s a demand for replacing traditional systems with water-based ones, we can see that it often relates to occupational safety concerns, as well as reducing process costs and making the new technology easy to handle. We also see something similar taking place in printing ink industry, where the water-based technology has always been tightly limited to printing on paper, whe- reas now already there are talks of water-based developments for application in rotogravure system for flexible packagingmaterials to replace the traditional technology based on nitrocellulose solvent.” Ismael Corazza, sales manager at Manchester Química, says there are at least two perspectives one needs to consider in assessing the current moment in the emulsion segment. “On the one hand, there’s been little technical development concerning the types of polymers available on themarket. On the other hand, there have been fantastic advances towards increasing competitiveness among styrene acrylic emulsion producers on the back of process automation, improved logistics for sourcing rawmaterials, and a balancing and development of resin formulations. This could mean that perhaps that market already has reached its peak as far as the development of styrene acrylic resins goes, but there’s plenty from room for technological improvements in high performance emulsions for paints and coatings in Brazil, as the market in specialty chemicals has yet tomore eagerly tapped by paint companies and their resin suppliers.” SILICAS - SOLID, CONSISTENT GROWTH Being so important in the industry, silica is used to impart specific properties to paints and coatings, such as matte finish, corrosion protection, abrasion resistance and stain resistance, to name a few. “In the industry’s decorative paint segment, one of themain demands fromour customers are products that will add strength to their paint products, for example, by increasing abrasion, stain and polishing resistance, while being efficient and having a low impact on the paint’s density. For varnishes, chief among formulators’ requests are materials featuring highmatting efficiency, clarity, scratch resistance and chemical strength. Fromour current portfolio, we have products to meet all of those customer requirements,” says Grace’s André Villani, regional sales manager for Latin America’s Southern Cone.