Covestro launches new Decovery® resin for exterior coatings

Covestro has launched Decovery^® SP-8310: a 37% bio-based, breathable, multi-purpose resin to enable exterior coatings with improved outdoor durability and enhanced bio-based content. As part of Covestro’s Decovery^® family of resins containing up to 52% bio-based content, the new solution addresses the decorative coating market’s need for longer-lasting outdoor coatings with a lower environmental impact.

Across the decorative coatings market, painters and consumers are increasingly seeking longer-lasting exterior coating systems. Through proprietary painter and consumer market research, Covestro found that adhesion and durability are key issues for painters in exterior paints. Specifically, as the use of multiple substrates becomes more common, painters increasingly need paints to deliver stronger multi-substrate adhesion. At the same time, as the global climate crisis becomes increasingly severe, exterior coatings are more vulnerable than ever to cracking under extreme weather conditions, which cause surfaces to contract and expand more severely. As a result, coatings now need to be more flexible to reach the required levels of durability. In response to the climate crisis, there is also growing demand from end-users and governments for more environmentally friendly coatings with enhanced bio-based content.

To enable its customers to meet both these performance and environmental needs, Covestro has developed Decovery^® SP-8310: an acrylic resin designed to formulate easily into multi-purpose paints with up to 37% bio-based content. The resin’s combination of UV- and water-resistance with low dirt pick-up gives it excellent long-term outdoor durability, making it well suited to architectural and industrial applications. And its broad adhesion profile means Decovery^® SP-8310 is also suitable for a wider range of substrates and application areas. The solution also delivers good water vapor permeability and high elongation, enabling long-lasting paint systems with high breathability and elasticity.

Thanks to its 37% bio-based content (verified by ¹⁴C analysis), Decovery^® SP-8310 can enable a carbon footprint reduction of up to 8% compared with non-bio-based water-based alternatives. ^[1]Taking the decorative wood coating market’s yearly consumption into account, this impact is equivalent to that of one million football fields of forest. ^[2]In this way, Decovery^® SP-8310 opens new possibilities for longer-lasting exterior coatings with enhanced bio-based content, as well as for a safer, more sustainable coatings industry.

Gerjan van Laar, Marketing Manager Architectural: "I’m delighted to be launching Decovery^® SP-8310 – a new-generation exterior solution. By addressing the market need for both improved outdoor durability and enhanced bio-based content, this resin will enable our customers to develop future-proof products, accelerate their growth, and improve their environmental impact. In line with our unique approach to decorative-market innovation, we’ll continue investigating these needs and developing solutions to meet them, helping the coatings industry to accelerate both its performance and sustainability."