What do we mean by Green technology? Nowadays everybody knows the importance of living in a much more sustainable way with respect for the environment. Talking about Paint companies, and more specifically about their laboratories, one of the biggest challenges today consists in optimizing the color formulation, reducing raw materials usage and paint disposal costs.

When it comes to producing color samples, laboratories currently work in two ways:

1. Producing samples by weight, which involves a reduced use of raw materials, but long production times, besides the human error that can never be completed avoided.
2. Producing samples with standard dispensers, which implies speed in the dispensing time, but high waste of raw materials (usually between 500cc and 1 liter per sample) due to the low precision of the machines.

Today there is a third solution available. Alfa has launched on the market the Color Lab a new-generation dispenser able to dispense simultaneously bases and colorants to reproduce any tint starting from 100cc, designed to optimize the formulation both in terms of time and costs. In order to achieve this, Alfa has designed and patented a pump that can dispense micro-drops of 0.0077cc (1/3840 fl oz), one tenth of the current standard, with absolute precision and repeatability. This pump is the first real dispensing technology that does not require repeated calibrations over time, but only a single initial set-up that ensures the repeatability of color formulation over time.

Having said that, the Color Lab can be also intended as a real Green solution because the formulation in 100cc allows laboratories to save up to 90% of raw materials, compared to the standard formulation in 1 liter. The saving is therefore not only on the quantity of product used, but also on waste disposal costs. To further optimize the formulation process, the Color Lab can be combined with the Mini Mixer, a compact mixer able to mix simultaneously up to 3 color samples in 30 seconds.

That being said, we can eventually consider how easy is to see a Color Lab repaying itself within just 1 or 2 years from its installation in Paint labs.

➜ Full article on the Coatings World magazine (11/14/2016) here

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