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Paints & Coatings: Understanding Their Impact on Sustainability, a Tech Talk with Sherwin-Williams


About This Program

Fueled by demand for spaces that contribute to occupant well-being, owners are looking to design and construct healthier buildings and therefore, architectural paint and coating products do so much more than protect a substrate and provide color! Today’s coatings must also meet stringent VOC regulations and offer material transparency for those seeking sustainable building certifications and help address common concerns prevalent in commercial spaces. With the recent introduction of LEED® v4.1, the U.S. Green Building Council placed an increased emphasis on transparency of product-level decisions. Transparency is critical to selecting products that perform as claimed, so design teams must figure out how to navigate different types of claims and certifications to find coatings that are 3rd-party certified. This discussion will provide you with the fundamentals of different paint systems and the latest technologies so that you can specify coatings that will provide the best outcome for your client.

Session Takeaways

  • Establish how design teams can make informed decisions and to help achieve sustainability goals and/or LEED® certification when specifying paints and coatings throughout a project, in order to help improve indoor air quality for the end-users.
  • Discuss the importance of specifying 3rd party certified low-emitting paint and coating products, and how they contribute to the well-being of the end-user.
  • Explain how 3rd party validations for paint and coatings bring transparency to Material Ingredient Reporting, which means that owners can be certain that they are using products that will support the best interests of the end-users throughout the lifecycle of the product.
  • Learn about coating technologies that provide proactive solutions to address indoor air quality challenges, such as mold and mildew and disease-causing bacteria on painted surfaces as well as off-gassing of formaldehyde from other building materials.

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Learning Units

CSI: 1.0 LU*
*May be submitted for domain specific learning units to CDT recertification, and/or general learning units for CCCA, CCS, and CCPR.

Relevant Practices

Specifying/Information Management
Product Selection/Specification