Strange phenomena in the domestic coating industry

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This post was last edited by Wang Genrong on 2016-8-20 at 08:00, summarizing the strange phenomena in China’s coating industry for colleagues to comment on. (1) As a major country in coating applications, are the coatings we use mainly Chinese brands? In our shipyards, marine engineering projects, **key construction sites, bridges, port machinery, wind power facilities, and other locations, paint products from foreign brands such as International, Zoddan, Hempel, PPG, and others can be seen everywhere. However, it is rare to find domestic Chinese brands; when a couple of such domestic brands’ paints do appear, it is only for a short time. We are a major country in the field of coating applications, but we don’t have any well-known domestic brands. When will domestic coatings start to play a significant role? (2) Can amateurs get what experts have? Apart from shipyards and offshore engineering, quality managers, company executives, owner representatives, and others involved in many industrial coating projects generally lack professional experience in coating applications, yet they are the ones who determine the quality of the coating work on these projects. During the acceptance of coating quality, the owner’s representative may rely on their own judgment to determine the quality of the coating. The root cause lies in the quality of painting, as well as the fact that the entire painting industry has not received sufficient attention in China. (3) Can paint containing heavy metals be used in China? As is well known, some developed countries such as those in Europe and the United States have clear legal and regulatory restrictions on the levels of heavy metals in coatings. However, China has yet to establish any such regulations or legal limits for industrial coatings. This has led to the widespread use of a large amount of paint containing heavy metals in domestic projects; for example, red lead primers, which have long been banned abroad, are still being produced and used in China. This not only pollutes our limited land and water resources but also directly affects the health of the population. (4) Can the construction contractor be more powerful than the owner? You can’t believe it, right? How could the construction party be more powerful than the owner? But this phenomenon does exist; domestic contractors who apply fireproof coatings need to obtain permission from the fire department. With this permission, such contractors have the authority to carry out their work, and without their efforts, the property owners cannot receive final approval from the fire department. What quality can the fireproof coating produced by a construction company that has more rights than the property owner possibly have? You don’t need to be told to know the answer. (5) Are you familiar with the domestic painting industry standards? I once compiled a catalog of domestic coating industry standards; just that catalog alone had over a dozen pages. For surface treatment at the base layer level, there are **national standards**, as well as various industry-specific standards (from the petrochemical, metallurgical, oil, and other sectors). I asked some well-known experts in China, and many of them had never even heard of those standards.