Australian consumers have been funding a paint stewardship scheme for the past seven years, but are they getting what they’re paying for in recycling, reusing and repurposing paint? The challenge is proving greater than anyone expected and for founding members, Dulux, PPG, Henry Haymes, Resene Paints and Sherwin-Williams Company and for Rust-Oleum and Palette Operations which have recently joined.
Australia’s only paint waste stewardship scheme has so far failed to find a viable way to recycle old paint into re-usable paint, but the scheme has significantly reduced the amount of paint and packaging waste going to landfill, according to the scheme’s chief executive.
In an interview with The Fifth Estate, Paintback chief executive officer Karen Gomez said most of the water-based paint collected under the scheme was still going to landfill but waste collectors who worked with Paintback had reduced the volume of paint by about half thanks to flocculation treatment that removed solids from the water.
Gomez said there were some examples overseas of paint being recycled into new paint products, but it was a “highly labour-intensive” process and the recycled paint lacked some of the properties of virgin paint.
“Paintback has made the decision that until we can find a market that is willing to take that [recycled paint] it is not a viable use”, said Gomez.
In 2015, Paintback – which is dominated by big-name paint brands such as Dulux – received approval from competition watchdog the ACCC to apply a 15 cent (plus GST) levy on the sale of every litre of architectural and design paint sold in Australia.
The ACCC renewed that approval in 2021 for 10 years, concluding the scheme was “likely to result in environmental benefits through increased collection of used paint and less improper disposal than would be the case if state, territory and local government collection programs continued to operate without the scheme”.
According to Paintback, of the more than 100 million litres of paint Australians buy every year, five per cent ends up as waste, making paint and its packaging one of the biggest sources of liquid waste to landfill.
The painting and decorating industry, among others, supported the introduction of the levy on paint sales, said managing director of the GreenPainters program at the National Painting and Decorating Institute, Daniel Wurm. But he said that support was based “on the understanding [the scheme] would fund a national paint recycling program”.
“Painters have been disappointed to learn that they have instead been paying for paint to be buried or burnt,” he said.
However, Gomez said Paintback was set up to dispose of paint waste more safely. “If you look at our constitution and why we were established, it’s to create a responsible disposal pathway and that we have done,” she said.
How much money has gone into this?
Paintback does not disclose how much money the levy raises from consumers, nor does it provide a breakdown of how the money is spent. However, it’s likely to be in the millions of dollars every year.
Asked about the lack of transparency about its finances, Gomez said the scheme was a registered not-for-profit organisation under charity regulator, the Australian Charities and Not-for-Profits Commission (ACNC).
“To protect competition in the paint market in Australia the charities regulator has agreed that the funding of the scheme and how [those funds are] used is to be kept confidential,” she said.
Paintback also does not disclose how much paint and packaging waste it diverts from landfill every year.
Gomez told The Fifth Estate the scheme collected four waste streams:
- Steel paint containers, mostly recycled subject to contamination of the material and availability of steel traders willing to take them
- Plastic packaging (which represents about 10 per cent of the packaging volume). Also problematic because “plastic is really hard to get clean, and to recycle … it has to have less than 3 per cent contamination”.
- Solvent paint, which represents about 30 per cent of total paint streams. It is being diverted from landfill to be used as an alternative to coal burnt in cement kilns. “We don’t like burning material, we see that as the next step up from landfill … it’s not great. We think it could be better”.
- Water-based paint (70 per cent of paint waste): It is not recycled into new paint products. Waste companies such as Cleanaway who work with Paintback remove water from the paint. “Water-based paint is about 50 per cent water … we dramatically reduce the amount of solids going to landfill,” said Gomez. She said water-based paint could be burnt but that “is not a pathway we adopt”.
Asked if, after seven years of the scheme, she could say it had substantially reduced the amount of old paint going to landfill Gomez said: “The paint that we’re collecting, if we added all that up, if we look at last year’s numbers, we believe it’s around 80 per cent of what we collect is diverted from landfill.
“We don’t have the current year’s [figures] because it’s just the end of July. So, we still have to wait for the numbers to come in from our contractors. But it’s around 80 per cent.”
Regarding plastic recycling, Gomez said Paintback was trialling a multipurpose, 4-litre bucket made of 100 per cent recycled plastic paint containers.
“But all of these things are considered proscribed waste because they have paint on them,” she said.
“It’s not like recycling PET drink bottles picked up in a vending machine … This is long-phase packaging that is designed to hold paint for, let’s say, a couple of years. Whoever’s handling it, has to have proper licensing… It’s not easy.”
Not good enough – no paint has been recycled
Jocelyn Bell of Circle Paints Ltd, a small Sydney-based company that collects and sells at a discount surplus trade paint, said Paintback’s research and development projects appeared to “perpetually languish at trial stage”.
“The Paintback Annual Review for 2021-22 talks about promoting reuse but as far as we can tell not a single litre has been reused out of the millions of litres collected by Paintback,” she said.
Gomez defended Paintback’s work. “When people say, ‘Where’s the progress?’ Well, we’ve got to be law-abiding, and we’ve got to prove that what we do does not have a worse environmental impact [than the existing system].”
For example, she said recycled plastic containers had to be technically sound, and at least as good if not better than using virgin plastic. If not, Paintback wouldn’t do it, she said.
When it comes to waste material such as toxic solvent paint, Gomez said Paintback had to pay cement manufacturers to use it as an alternative fuel for kilns. It doesn’t rate well on Paintback’s hierarchy of reuses, but she said at least it reduced that industry’s reliance on coal.
“Over the total program, of all of the [material] streams we collect, it is about an 80 per cent [reduction]. Water-based paint is about 50 per cent reduced. Water-based paint is our biggest challenge. That’s where our R&D has been focused,” Gomez said.
Paintback is involved with a number of universities and commercial players investigating alternative uses of paint and paint packaging waste, with an eventual target of reducing the amount of material sent to landfill by 90 per cent.
“Now we haven’t actually been able to achieve that yet. As I mentioned before, whilst we might innovate, we still have to get regulatory approval to even send water-based paint for someone to trial,” she said.
But Paintback was providing a much safer disposal path and, unlike previous government schemes that were only open to residents, Paintback was open to trade painters.
There’s not much savings in waste
However, GreenPainters’ Wurm said he was worried the scheme might result in more waste being produced because painting contractors could offload commercial quantities of waste paint at no cost.
“There is no incentive for them to reduce waste by efficient estimating,” he said.
Gomez said there were no warehouses full of paint waiting to be processed.
“It is really dangerous to stockpile paint,” she said. “Illegally, people have done it [but] we exist so we can ensure that does not happen.”
She said if there was a disruption to the collection chain for some reason, Paintback stopped collecting paint because it was safer for old paint to remain under someone’s house than to sit in a council or waste contractor’s depot for extended periods of time.
Who’s involved?
According to the ACCC, the five founding members of Paintback were major paint manufacturers Dulux, PPG, Henry Haymes, Resene Paints and Sherwin-Williams Company. Since then, Rust-Oleum and Palette Operations have joined.
Action so far
Paintback has spent time and energy educating the public and the painting trade about the value of recycling paint. It estimates that its marketing and communication campaigns have reached over nine million Australians.
It has commissioned various advertising campaigns, such as one with creative agency 10 Feet Tall that asked consumers to give their old cans new life by taking them to Paintback.
According to Paintback’s 2022 annual review, one in 10 Australian households reported using Paintback.
Who oversees this scheme and why all the secrecy?
The ACCC, which gave Paintback the exemption from competition rules to apply the levy on sales, would not comment on whether it has or would ever check to see if Paintback was doing what it said it would do with the levy funds.
Paintback is a registered not-for-profit organisation under charity regulator, the Australian Charities and Not-for-Profits Commission (ACNC).
Registered charities must provide the charities regulator with an annual information statement (AIS) detailing finance. Charities can apply to have that information withheld from the public on various grounds, such as when the information is commercially sensitive.
A media spokesperson for the ACNC told The Fifth Estate that the regulator could not make any comments about a specific registered organisation because of “secrecy provisions”.