The Waterborne China Platform is a non-profit collective formed by DSM and other coating players in China nearly a decade ago with the aim of helping the container industry migrate to waterborne coatings - which contain up to eight times fewer VOCs than solvent-borne equivalents.
As a leading supplier of waterborne resin technology - the ‘backbone’ of all paints and coatings - DSM has chaired the platform since its inception, but it wasn’t until 2013 that things really took off, when the Chinese government released its ‘Air Pollution Prevention and Control Action Plan’.
For the next three-to-four years, the Platform team worked tirelessly across the industry, organizing meetings, seminars and workshops aimed at educating everyone in the value chain on the benefits of moving to a waterborne coating technology - not least the Container Owner Association (COA). And after much debate and discussion (and occasionally, disagreement) the entire industry eventually agreed to migrate.