The eco paint job

In the tech world, people regularly bandy around the phrase “early adopter”. If you’re unfamiliar with the phrase, here’s a quick definition:

If you’re the first person to buy the first ludicrously overpriced piece of electronic equipment, you justify the shocking price to your partner/housemate/mum by calling yourself “an early adopter”, thus justifying your monstrous overspend on the latest GPS-enabled wireless-ready blueray-bearing gizmotronic thingy as essential in some Darwinian sense. If I hadn’t bought it I’d have perished like the rest of you losers!!!

Instead, I’d like to celebrate those real early adopters - the ones who experimented with green technologies early so the likes of me can then amble behind in their footsteps. In real Darwinian terms, these are the heroes…

I remember meeting a woman who’d set up an organic farm here in Sussex in the early 70s, raising what seemed like several dozen children, and getting by by the skin of her teeth to produce food that there was barely a market for in those days. Or the people who persisted with solar and wind energy in the 60s and 70s who were pilloried as sandal-wearing eccentrics.

What turned my thoughts this way was the topic of eco paint. For reasons which I won’t go into now, but will do soon, I am extremely excited to have some walls to paint.

And so I’ve been taking a look round to find some good eco paint products to slap on the walls. The fact that there is now a substantial range of this stuff on the market is testimony to the early adopters. Taking on the giants of the paint world isn’t easy. OK, so their products are environmentally lethal - packed with volatile organic compounds (or VOCs) like benzene, formaldehyde, ammonia, toluene and just about anything else ugly - but look! They come in such pretty shades and they’re so easy to apply in just one non-drip coat.

To create a new business based around paint, you’re taking on a formidable set of competitors, who hold most of the cards. And you have to spend a lot of time experimenting with brownish goos extracted from plants that don’t function very well at all.

But that hasn’t put people off. Over the last few years there’s an increasing number of small companies who are trying to make environmentally responsible products.

The job - as dear old Eco Worrier pointed out some time ago - is to chose which one. Each eco paint product has its own set of environmental priorities. As happens all too often, suppliers knock each others’ products. “They’re not really eco-friendly.”….”There’s no such thing as an organic paint.”

Anyway, working my way through the maze (I’ll spare you the details) I finally chose IEKO, a company in Forest Row, not too far from here.

Karoly, the owner, opened the shop on his day off for me. I chose biopin white emulsion for the ceiling, biopin mushroom for the walls - and I’ve already put Osmo hard floor varnish on the floorboards, and it works a treat.

I’m hoping to be able to stock his eco paints soon… I’ll keep you posted.

The photo by Somewhat Frank is of a pot of paint by the American eco paint manufacturer Benjamin Moore, who, as it happens, do a range of EcoSpec green paints.

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This entry was written by Nigel and posted on Tuesday, April 17th, 2007 at 9:42 am and filed under Eco products, Nigel's Eco Store, Eco build. Bookmark the permalink. You can follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment, or trackback from your own site.

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