Businesses and retailers are invited to donate leftover paint to the Community RePaint network, rather than send it for disposal.
The network also remanufactures donated paint to produce their own ReColour paint.
Over the past two decades, the initiative – funded by Dulux – has redistributed 5.4m litres to individuals and community projects across 80 national schemes.
This includes 1m litres through the Wirral branch alone (enough paint to cover Big Ben over 2,000 times1.)
According to the British Coatings Federation, an estimated 55m litres of paint is wasted in the UK each year2.
Community RePaint was established to recover and redistribute paint waste to the wider community at affordable prices, reducing paint going to landfill in the process.
As a result of repurposing 370,000 litres last year alone, the equivalent of 14.5 million kilos of CO2 has been saved – equal to taking over 70,000 flights from Heathrow to Madrid*. This year, over 200,600 litres of paint has been reused so far, helping 1,153 organisations and 20,000 individuals add colour to their lives.
The remanufactured paint, ReColour, has been used by over 500 community organisations since 2015 and offers an affordable high-quality decorating option for charities, community organisations, religious groups and those in social need.
Using patented technology, leftover paint is filtered, treated, and blended to create a range of high-quality interior, exterior, gloss, garden, and chalk furniture paints at the Wirral and Cambridgeshire schemes.
Peter Howard is Sustainability and CSR Lead at AkzoNobel, the parent company of Dulux paints. He said, “We are tremendously proud to have been working with the Community RePaint network since its inception to divert more and more leftover paint from the waste stream and put it to its best use: colouring lives.
“The Wirral’s incredible milestone in redistributing 1 million litres of paint is just one example of the tremendous achievements of the network, with many more schemes sure to soon follow.
“Seeing all the great work the schemes have done in supporting their local communities highlight just how important the network is. We remain committed to supporting this impactful initiative, whilst working more widely across our supply chain to improve the sustainability and circularity of the decorative paint industry.”
Lilian Graves, Community RePaint Network Officer, added, “We know that over 50 million litres of paint go to waste each year in the UK.
“It’s a shocking statistic, and at Community RePaint, we’re determined to provide a solution.”
Dulux’s sponsorship of Community RePaint forms part of AkzoNobel’s wider purpose to “Paint the Future”. Dulux and AkzoNobel aim to: reduce carbon emissions in their operations and value chain by 50% in 2030; use 100% circular materials in 2030; empower over 100,000 people by 2030; and support over 2,000 community projects by 2030.
Donate or order paint
Details on how and where to pass on leftover or surplus paint for reuse from your business available here.
If you need 60 or more litres of affordable high-quality paint delivered to your organisation, view the ReColour range here.
Community projects can find their local scheme through a postcode search.
References
Based on 10 million square metres divided by surface area of Big Ben (4608 square metres)
coatings.org.uk/page/PaintCare
