Annually, the United States produces more than one billion gallons of architectural and industrial paint and coatings to protect and beautify the walls, roofs and floors of its homes, schools, commercial buildings and industrial plants.  These paints and coatings are produced primarily from crude oil which has been converted into common polymers, known as urethanes, epoxies, latexes, vinyls and acrylics. 

In the past twenty years, the paints and coatings industry has placed a great deal of emphasis on the formulation of water-based paints, replacing solvent carriers and their subsequent release as greenhouse gasses.   As a result, more than 50% of today’s paints and coatings are “water-based” and are “environmentally” superior to the solvent-based coatings of the past.

But even with these environmentally-driven improvements, for every gallon of organic paint that we consume, we must process at least 10 gallons of crude oil.  And for every gallon of paint applied, one pound of green house gas (VOC’s) is emitted into our atmosphere.  Collectively, our effort to protect and architecturally enhance our environment costs 195,000 barrels of crude oil per day and adds 10,000,000 pounds of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere every day.

That is a pretty substantial carbon footprint!

Silicon Derivatives was founded to commercialize a silicon-polymer-based technology that either entirely replaces, or significantly reduces, the demand for these organic polymer coatings.  This technology allows the production of polymers, created from a globally common resource – silica sand – instead of depleting our petroleum resources.  Further, the resulting silicon polymers and polyorganosilicon hybrids emit only nominal amounts of greenhouse gases when they are applied and cured. 

On a comparative basis, Silicon Derivatives products release no more than 10% of the VOC’s contained in traditional epoxy, acrylic or urethane coatings, and require less than 5% of the crude oil of a typical organic polymer coating.  In other words, if we could replace the organic polymers with silicon polymers, the demand for crude oil would be reduced by 180,000 barrels per day and greenhouse emissions would drop 9.5 million pounds per day.

A pretty substantial reduction in that carbon foot print!

And that is our mission – to shrink carbon foot prints with grains of sand!