Latin America. In an exclusive interview, the commercial director of Coatings and Monomers for the North Region of Latin America of Dow, Juan Carlos Orozco, gave some brushstrokes about the portfolio exhibited at LACS 2022.
For Juan Carlos Orozco, this year's meeting organized by the National Association of Paint and Ink Manufacturers (Anafpyt) was extraordinary. "Seeing people in the industry again after so many years being from the screen has been a super experience," he said in conversation with Zona de Pinturas about the 16th edition of the Latin American Coatings Show 2022 (LACS 2022).
One of the key themes during this, the most important international exhibition in Latin America of supply for the paints, inks and coatings industry, was sustainability. This in turn has been one of the pillars of Dow, a multinational that combines chemistry, biology and physics to create innovative products.
"We have a long internal history of sustainability," Orozco said, highlighting architectural water-based painting as a technology that has driven the company to replace some solvent-based applications, especially in industrial applications.
Precisely at LACS, the company presented a series of platforms aimed at industrial applications. One of them is the HG-100, designed for general water-based industrial applications and which facilitates the formulation of high-quality glossy primers and finishes.
"If you want to paint a fence in your house or a metal door in your house, you would normally paint with a solvent-based chemical resin. We have a material that delivers super good shine, the necessary resistance for that application, and that is also much more sustainable because it is replacing the volatiles of the solvent with water," said Juan Carlos, pointing out that this is better for the one who applies it and has a carbon impact "which is something that we should all be looking for."
Another of the technologies exposed was the HG300, for applications with a higher corrosion requirement.
"This does not require shine because they are for corrosion resistance, chemical resistance and more industrial applications, and so we have our platform of water-based technologies that allows us to start replacing normally solvent-based technologies with our innovation towards sustainability," he said.
Juan Carlos acknowledged that these products have had a significant attraction in Latin America. "Even one of our platforms is already produced in the country, which is a very important advantage," he said in reference to the HG100 produced at the Queretaro plant.
"In addition, we believe that we are bringing this technology to our country at a time when we need to continue innovating, which is one of our passions," he concluded.
