Environmental Benefits Of Using Natural Materials And Products.

Summary

You should use Natural Paints, Natural Plasters, Natural Insulation and Woodcare products because set against conventional products...

contibute to the mitigation and reduction of climate change.
they reduce the use of finite natural resources and the degradation of the natural environment and their use is sustainable.
they hugely reduce waste and even produce beneficial, compostable by products.

...and by generally encouraging the use and development of products that are more environmentally friendly in their recovery and manufacture, their degradation and their disposal, they help to ensure a sustainable future for all.

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The Environmental Arguments in favour of Natural Products are possibly the strongest. There are a number of serious issues that we, globally, have to deal with, for our own, our children's and our grandchildren's sake.

These include climate change, biodiversity and natural resource depletion, waste generation and disposal and other issues associated with many of the chemicals and materials that we use in our everyday lives and which are usually synthesised from petro chemicals and oil, including plastics, fertilisers, paint and other household items incuding, incidentally, petrol, which is often a constituent of conventional modern paints.

Partly as a result of an historic accident, the world has come to depend on oil for vitually every aspect of our lives. Commercial influences played a huge part in the development of this dependancy. Did you know, for example, that Rudolf Diesel, who developed the diesel engine, designed it specifically to run on vegetable oil but the petro chemical industry, with all its money, marketed it as an engine dependant upon petro chemical based oils? Which is why we continue to use petro chemical fuel in diesel engines rather than biodiesel. We're all encouraged these days to recycle our waste, to drive more efficient cars and to buy our energy from renewable sources. But not enough attention is being paid to the impact that our houses have on the big issues - particularly the way that we decorate and manage them....the chemicals that we use to paint our homes, how and what we use to insulate them with (not all insulation is all good). It's not just the product components or the end products themselves and what goes into them but the raw materials and the manufacturing and distribution processes that are behind these products that we should also be concerned about.

If a given product uses a lot of energy in its production, this energy comes to be known as 'embodied energy' and represents part of the true cost of the product. Except that that this cost is rarely built into to the sale price of conventional products because current accounting methods assume that environmental impacts and resource use are not to be viewed as a finite resource - capital - but as an unlimited resource. Don't take our word for this...it's a fundamental aspect of a whole mainstream field of economics termed 'Environmental Economics'. See here for more.

Global Warming

One of the most significant pollutants that derive from conventional, petro-chemical paints - virtually all conventional paints that we buy - are called Non Methane Volatile Organic Compounds (NMVOCs - generally referred to as simply 'VOCs' on most tins). These chemicals, which manifest as the fumes given off from paint but also varnishes and polishes, insulation and a host of other home maintenance products - even the timber from which modern houses are built - help to generate low level ozone which causes smog and pollution in towns and cities. They increase the formation of tropospheric ozone and so contribute indirectly to climate change as ozone is a strong greenhouse gas. [source: EU Eurostat Environmental Pressure Indicators]

Furthermore, where paints are made from petro chemical based derivatives, they are a by product of the 'carbon economy'. The reintroduction of carbon into the atmosphere, carbon that nature has stored away underground as oil, is the prime contributor to man made global warming. By using conventional paints, we are supporting and encouraging the use of petro chemicals and therefore Global Warming.

The whole ethos of Natural Products is to avoid, as far as possible, the use of ingredients and processes that contribute to Global Warming, even as far as using renewable energy in manufacturing processes. Furthermore, when you buy products off this site, a proportion of the proceeds goes to Climate Care to offset the climate change impacts of transporting your goods from the factory, via us, to you. We can't make it any better than that.

Natural Resources

The financial markets think of natural resources as oil, copper, manganese and other valuable commodities that we dig up from the earth and make money from. A more academic, or environmental, definition would include such things as clean air, clean water, good soil, forests, flora and fauna and even the aesthetic apsects of landscape.

The aspects of many modern manufacturing technologies and processes that threaten natural resources [using the correct, fuller definition] only regard the commodities derived from natural resources as having value, and scant regard is paid to the implications of mining and and manufacturing processes for natural resources in the wider sense. And so conventional paints are made from non renewable resources and are produced in an unsustainable manner that generates huge amounts of waste and uses massive amounts of energy, itself generated from unsustainable sources in the first place.

Petrochemical based paints are by definition ultimately derived from crude oil. Oil is a finite resource. And they're non biodegradeable and so, as they enter ecosystems as they surely do through inefficient disposal and spillage, the chemicals from which they are made are there to stay. When you use paints sold on this site, you can pour any waste or excess onto your compost heap! No more worries about pouring them down the drain.

Gypsum plaster, which is bt far the most popular form of plaster in general use is made from Gypsum, derived from sediments of ancient seabeds. These are mined using strip mining techniques which devastate the ecology of the areas where the mining takes place - the top layers of earth, including all flora and fauna, are simply stripped away to reveal the deposits beneath. Gypsum is also derived from the flue-gas desulphurization of fossil fuel powered power stations.

Waste

Statistics on the amount of waste produced as a by product of synthetic paint manufacture are hard to come by. Not surprising really as the manufacturers doubtless wouldn't want us to know, if the figures are bad. But reputable sources quote average waste volumes as a by product of conventional paint manufacture as being somewhere between 10 and 30 times the volume of paint that's actually produced! It's hard work but searching the internet for this data will produce these figures again and again.

Of course, as we wish to be honest and truthful and not sensationalist on this site, a 'by product' could be pure water for all we know...but some how, we doubt it. And at least a significant proportion is bound to be toxic waste... they're processing oil after all. Compare this to the fact that the by products of almost all of the paints sold on this site are compostable. Both Auro and Aglaia compost all their waste.

But regardless, take a look at these diagrams, which come care of Aglaia:

See how the synthetic paint production process has to create waste whereas the Natural Paint process is part of a naturally sustainable cycle? They're based on ingredients that can be reabsorbed into the environment thereby negating any impact. Natural Paints, as we've explained elsewhere on this site, also include a small amount of synthetics in order to satisfy modern user requirements, but the point is that the amounts are massively reduced...and this is one reason, together with there being less embodied energy and the constituents being derived from sustainable sources, why Natural Paints are far better for the environment than conventional petro chemical based paints.

The Natural Choice when Decorating - www.NaturalDeco.co.uk - Eco Friendly Organic and Natural Decorating

Choose Natural Deco for your trusted supplier of Eco Friendly Organic Natural Paints and many other Natural Decorating products .... including eco friendly organic natural plasters, eco friendly organic natural primers and emulsions, eco friendly organic natural glazes and waxes, eco friendly natural varnishes and oils. Plus eco friendly organic natural insulation ... sheep wool, hemp and cotton insulation.

Environmental Benefits of using Natural Materials and Products.