Go Green

At Paint Doctor we believe that it’s more than just a coat of paint that makes your home beautiful. That is why we are committed to safeguarding the future of the planet, and making our country a better place. We thrive upon a value driven culture, and are driven to use and embrace our power to do good by the world.

We have taken some big and interesting steps to do this:

We incorporate only lead free paints
We use only low VOC levels (volatile organic compounds) in all our products
We are extremely water wise – only using plain water to accomplish our high pressure washing – relying more on technique than detergents
We definitely encourage recycling!
And last but not least, we consume power in a responsible way, making use of sophisticated systems to achieve this

The Green Building Council of South Africa (GBCSA) set the standard for which (VOC’s) Volatile Organic Compounds are to be measured. They use a Green Star rating system to determine which paints are environmentally friendly or not.

From a performance standpoint, advances in paint technology mean that high quality water-based paints are in many respects equal to or superior to their solvent-based equivalents. High quality acrylic emulsions offer excellent durability, quick drying time, and the emission of less odor.

Paint Doctor manufactures a range of water based paints that offer best-in-class coverage as well as application characteristics that strike an optimum balance between sustainability and performance, with all VOC levels being compliant with Green Star SA requirements.

Furthermore, to ensure that our company’s ecological footprint is kept to a minimum, all the other materials that we use are also selected to support the Green Star rating.

Make sure that all the ingredients in the paint are listed on the paint container. If they are not, then we advise to look for another brand. Some brands are also listed as ‘organic’ but still contain harmful chemicals.
VOC is expressed in percentage. Choose a low VOC paint. Minimal = 0 – 0.29%, Low, Medium, High and Very High (VOC content of greater than 50%).
avoid solvent based paint – not only do ‘oil based’, or ‘alkyd’ paints contain significantly higher VOc levels than water based paints, but they also require white spirit or turpentine (another potential source of solvents) to clean your brushes.
beware of marketing gimmicks – there are a lot of labels out there that claim to be Low – VOC, No VOC, VOC free, odourless, odour-free, natural or organic paints. But because there’s no set standard for defining these, they are often misused.
To calculate a paint’s Green Star rating, sum up the VOC’s for each raw material that the paint is made up of. If the TVOC content of the individual components is not known, then the experimental methodology set out by the GBCSA must be followed to determine the correct nature of the paint.
Tip – A quick way of finding out if a paint is solvent or water based is to check the label about how to clean the brushes? Solvent-based paints need to be cleaned with white spirit or turpentine, water-based paints can be cleaned with warm, soapy water.

At Paint Doctor we are committed to maintaining continuing practices and developments within the ‘Go Green’ field.