AQMD Adopts Tough New Rules for a Variety of Paints

Once again taking aim at the paint bucket, Southern California’s smog fighting agency adopted regulations Friday that will slash the amount of polluting chemicals allowed in a wide variety of industrial and household paints.

The air pollution rules will force manufacturers to embark on expensive reformulations of nearly half the paint sold in the region, and, according to analysts for the anti-smog agency, drive up retail prices for those products by almost a third.

The board of the South Coast Air Quality Management District approved the regulations on an 8-1 vote over the heated protests of paint industry representatives, who crowded into the agency’s auditorium for 2 1/2 hours of testimony.

Manufacturers, painting contractors and retailers complained that the new pollution limits are unrealistic, will lower the quality of water-based paints and will drive some small paint companies out of business.

“This is, by many magnitudes, the most drastic and most expensive, ruinous amendment ever proposed” in the AQMD’s 22-year program of regulating paint, said Ray Robinson, executive director of a regional trade group called the Environmental, Legislative and Regulatory Advocacy Program.

The rules substantially cut levels of volatile organic compounds, or hydrocarbons, permitted in various products. Emitted by petroleum-based solvents in paint, such compounds react in sunlight with nitrogen oxides to form ozone, a major component of smog.

“There is no way to win the war on smog without addressing this pollution source,” AQMD Executive Officer Barry Wallerstein said in an interview this week.

The agency has been tackling paint for years and has been sued various times by manufacturers. In fact, much of the paint addressed in this round of regulations was the subject of 1990 rules partly overturned in court for lack of an environmental assessment of certain issues. This version is even tougher than the earlier one.

The new rules, to be phased in over the next seven years, deal with primers and sealers, industrial paint, household quick-dry enamels and glossy paint used on woodwork and in bathrooms and kitchens. Stains and various coatings--floor, roof and rust preventive--would also be affected.

Reformulating the paint, most of which is water-based but still contains polluting solvents, to meet the new standards will cost the industry more than $800 million and add $6 to the regional cost of a gallon of glossy paint, according to the AQMD.

The cost of such paint can now vary from a low of about $13 a gallon to as high as $30 a gallon or more, depending on quality and brand.

The price increase will be worth it, the agency says, because the reformulations will eliminate nearly 22 tons of volatile organic compounds emitted each day, or slightly more than 2% of all such compounds produced daily in the Los Angeles Basin by all sources, including cars and industry.

As it dries, paint of all types used on structures sends 58 tons a day of volatile organic compounds into basin air. It would take 1.8 million cars to produce the same amount of hydrocarbons.

“This is a very large [pollution] source, and if we’re ever to get to clean air, it has to be tackled,” Wallerstein said.

In the past, the agency has turned its attention to auto paint, aerosol spray and flat paint, which must meet lower pollution limits by 2002. AQMD paint pollution standards are already the strictest in the nation, and the rules adopted Friday make them even tougher, pushing the envelope of paint technology.

Many in the paint industry contend that manufacturers are being asked to do the impossible.

“These limits are so low that technology-minded people with years of experience can’t even begin to conceive of how they’re going to formulate coatings to meet those limits. They haven’t got a clue,” said Jim Sell, senior counsel for the National Paint & Coatings Assn.

The AQMD staff responds that it has been hearing that argument for years.

Moreover, the paint industry is not entirely united against the standards.

Co-owners of Dunn-Edwards Corp., the largest supplier of paint in Southern California, testified Friday in favor of the new standards.

It was a dramatic turnabout for the company, which in the past has been a leading AQMD adversary and taken the agency to court. But the last round of industry lawsuits, challenging the AQMD’s 1996 regulations on flat paint, have so far gotten nowhere.

“The past didn’t work,” said Howard Berman, lobbyist for Dunn-Edwards. “The litigation was not achieving what Dunn-Edwards wanted.”

He added that the new rules contain several “safety net” provisions that make them acceptable.

One leaves room for a change in the rules as the compliance deadlines approach if the new paint formulations don’t yet seem feasible.

Another clause allows companies to average the volatile organic compound levels of their products, so they could sell some kinds of paint with higher amounts if other products offset them.

And Dunn-Edwards also hopes that research at a smog chamber now under construction at UC Riverside may prove that the volatile organic compounds in paint are not as reactive, and thus as polluting, as the AQMD staff believes they are.

Ed Laird, president of Coatings Resource Corp. of Huntington Beach, is another manufacturer who supports the new pollution limits.

“I think it’s time now to work through the process of regulation and [get rid] of the lawyers and get some chemists employed and meet the regulations,” he said this week. “It’s within the grasp of companies to reformulate.”

Others disagree, insisting that the AQMD is effectively outlawing thousands of paint products, because the industry will be unable to come up with workable formulas that meet the new standards.

“It’s going to ban a lot of products we consider our best,” said Dave Leehy, a manager at Vista Paint Co. in Fullerton and chairman of the Environmental, Legislative and Regulatory Advocacy Program.

Small regional manufacturers argue that they will be particularly hard hit, since many sell to niche markets and specialize in the paint types covered by the new rules.

Many in the industry say previous mandates for reformulations have hurt the quality of oil-based paints, causing them to yellow and making them less durable. Now, they complain, the new regulations will diminish the quality of the best water-based paints.

Not so, counters the AQMD. Based on lab testing of low-hydrocarbon paint, “We do not believe there are any major problems with the paint,” said agency spokesman Bill Kelly, adding that there are already products on the market that meet the new standards.

Moreover, he said, the strictest limits will not go into effect until 2006, providing ample time for paint technology to meet the new challenges.

Of the nine AQMD board members present for Friday’s vote, only Los Angeles County Supervisor Mike Antonovich opposed the regulations. “Sell a can of paint, go to jail,” he said, arguing that the rules would cut a comparatively small amount of pollution and that the agency should instead go after bigger pollution sources.