So let's see. Paint a house once an average of every ten years with oil paints or paint the same house every er... year or two with latex? And that's supposed to save the environment? WTF? In what way?
Can any paint experts enlighten me on the subject? Latex paints serve a nice role, but they don't strike me as very viable as outside paints and their erm... qualities (for lack of a better word) are different enough that there are instances where I would rather use oil (eg restoring cabs).
Hey SavannahLion,
I hear you! It is a really lame, lame law. Thankfully, I live in a state that has not banned oil paint....yet. I have a house with coated mineral board siding, latex wont even last more than a year on it. Not to mention that I do some detail painting work, and you will never get latex paint to work on detailed surfaces, it will just clog and fill the pores. I understand that oil paint takes precautions, but we don't need to be nannied and told we can't use oil paint "for our own good".
I did a little research on my own. Oil paint is considered hazardous because the solvent contains oils that are considered to produce Volatile Organic Compounds, or VOC's. That's the stuff that makes the nasty vapors when drying. Now, I understand banning lead paint, but to ban a very useful product because it uses a naturally occuring, organic compound sounded a bit bizzarre. I wanted to put things into perspective. Here are some quick and dirty numbers I calculated to determine how much of a hazard these VOC's are.
There is an estimated 80,000,000 gallons of paint used in the US each year.
16% of paint sold each year is oil based. (Some VOC producing others low VOC producing, but states ban them both).
That makes 12,800,000 gallons of oil paint used every year. (80,000,000 X 16%)
I estimated that a gallon of oil paint is roughly 4Kg.
That means that 51,200,000 Kg of oil paint are used each year. (12,800,000 X 4)
I found that generally, Oil based paint is 30% solvent, so that leaves 15,360,000 Kg of solvent evaporated each year.
Now, I looked up how much VOC is naturally occuring in the US, I couldn't find a total of all VOC, but I found an amount of the a calculation of the amount of the VOC class
terpenes that I was able to apply to the amount of national forest we have in the US. (Both Found on Wikipedia). On a summer day, the US National forests naturally produce about 42,774,194 Kg of terpenes per day.
So, if we give the benefit of the doubt that ALL solvent in oil paint is VOC, it takes
0.35 days for the U.S. National forests to naturally produce that amount of terpenes alone. (42,774,194 Kg/15,360,000 Kg)
I hope that puts into perspective how little impact VOC's from oil paints have on the environment.
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