Since 2016, the environmental protection trend has "blown" into the coating industry, causing many enterprises to suffer greatly. However, up to now, the environmental protection trend has not stopped, bringing favorable development to the water-based paint industry.

In today's environment of environmental inspections and new policies being introduced tomorrow, there are still some enterprises that want to cling to solvent-based coatings. When they see the wave of water-based products coming, they think about making changes, but as soon as the pressure eases, they quickly rekindle their old relationship with solvent-based coatings. Some even secretly produce during environmental inspections. However, these practices are no different from drinking poison to quench thirst, and they will ultimately be eliminated by the times.

The popularity of water-based paint is still high.

Since we are talking about the times, we all know that after suffering from environmental damage, society is calling for green and environmentally friendly production to promote sustainable development. In the coating industry, driven by social calls, water-based paint has emerged, aiming to create leading water-based paint brands with keywords such as environmental protection, high performance, fashion, and value, continuously promoting the healthy development of human society.

In fact, water-based paint is not only "popular" in China; even on a global scale, its popularity is still high. Taking the United States as an example, according to the latest research results from Freedonia Group, an industry research company in Cleveland, although historically solvent-based coatings have dominated the protective and specialty coatings industry in the U.S., water-based paint is expected to surpass solvent-based coatings to become the main variety in this field before 2020.

This trend change is mainly due to the impact of regulatory policies and regulations on the protective and specialty coatings market, where traditional organic solvents will gradually lose their advantages in coating formulations, leading to a preference for water-based paints and other products with low or no VOC emissions. Does this situation seem familiar? That's right, the situation in our country is similar.

Turning to the green water-based paint industry.

Environmental issues such as smog, PM2.5, global warming, and decoration pollution are troubling consumers, making low-carbon and environmentally friendly products the most popular among consumers. The environmental performance and low VOC emissions of water-based paint have become the first choice for consumers, coupled with our country's VOC emission charging policy encouraging the use of non-solvent-based coatings, leading many enterprises to turn to the green water-based paint industry.

Currently, society provides a huge development space for the concept of environmentally friendly coatings. Consumers' need for environmental protection is now equivalent to their needs for food, clothing, housing, and transportation. The country hopes that more enterprises will move towards a sustainable development path of green and environmental protection, so the water-based paint industry is rapidly developing in such a favorable environment, with sales far ahead of its peers.

Under the subjective awareness of health and environmental protection among consumers, polluting coatings are gradually being marginalized, while the trend is towards environmentally friendly, high-quality water-based coatings, making the development of water-based paint very promising. Of course, merely stating this is not very convincing, so we can only list some data. The following are the domestic water-based coating projects under construction as of March 2017.

Domestic water-based coating projects under construction in March 2017.

Under the heavy pressure of environmental protection, some self-satisfied enterprises have begun to accelerate their transfer to the mainland, thinking that such a transfer will allow them to pass off inferior products. However, in recent years, the industrial parks in the mainland have actually changed their previous model of blindly pursuing investment without considering the industrial structure of the settled enterprises, gradually emphasizing the requirements for the environmental protection product structure of the chemical and coating enterprises they undertake.

Once regarded as a "paradise for backward production capacity," the industrial park has eliminated hundreds of backward and heavily polluting enterprises in the past two years. Although this alone will reduce investment in the entire industrial park by tens of billions, it has maintained the bottom line of environmental protection. It is evident that people have deeply realized how necessary it is to eliminate backward production capacity, and the "popularity" of water-based paint is quite natural.

As we all know, the current national environmental protection policies are very stringent, and water-based paint has a strong advantage in environmental protection. It is not surprising that many enterprises are turning to the water-based paint industry, which will promote the sustainable development of the water-based paint industry.