Healthier Living
We are all interested in healthier living, but what has that got to do with ‘paint and polish’?!
Well, in our experience – a great deal. Paints, varnishes and wood stains are made in a particular way with particular ingredients and this has an impact on the air you breathe in the home and indeed, outside the home.
It all comes down to what you put in the paint and how it gets there. Whatever you use will produce a chemical legacy – as the paint is made, as the paint dries and in the case of modern paints; after it has dried, in a process known as ‘off-gassing’.
Wet paint requires an exchange of solvents with the air to dry. This can be a simple oxidisation (drying in the air) or it can be a process requiring a synthetic chemical catalyst. The oxidisation process results in an inert paint layer, whereas it is increasingly understood that the chemical catalyst process superficially ‘cures’ the paint but that some polymers (the paint binders) can chemically unravel over time. Some smells (a sign of the presence of solvents in the air) from paint will linger for several weeks and for some people, will induce headaches and in a few cases, skin reactions. What is little understood is the long-term effect of exposure to household chemicals; but there are already signs that emissions in the air cause problems for the growing number of people with multiple chemical sensitivity (MCS) as well as for young children.
The issue for all of us is that we don’t really know what is happening. Paints are not required to carry ingredients lists and what is in the air is invisible to us.
We need to know. Only we the consumer should decide what is right for us and our welfare.
This is why AURO publish full declarations of the ingredients used for every product they make. From this you will be able to identify any ingredient to which you might be allergic or indeed, opposed to in principle. What you will see is that at AURO we select all of our ingredients from nature. This does not mean compromising on product performance. For over 35 years the AURO labs have been creating and refining their plant technologies. Rather as the pharmaceutical industry researches the healing power of nature and then mimics it, AURO observe the useful properties of plants and then harnesses them, but without radical chemistry. This means that their properties and effects are chosen for their usefulness and only gentle chemistry is required to transform them into a host of safe and high performing paints, wood care products and cleaners.
Fundamentally, modern paint making relies on petro-chemistry to transform crude hydrocarbons into useable polymers. This requires a great deal of energy and some highly volatile chemicals. It is not what we at AURO see as an environmentally responsible process as it results in significant carbon emissions!
You will see that we don’t rely on the phrase ‘eco-friendly’ as it is carried by most water-based paints these days, regardless of whether they derive from crude oil and the vast majority do! There is no sensible definition of ‘eco-friendly’ that we are aware of.
We also do not claim our paints to be ‘organic’ even though a number of our ingredients are farmed to certified Organic standards. Organic is a misleading term in the field of paints as it can be used if the paint is made with ingredients such as hydro carbons; as crude oil ultimately derives from plant and animal matter, all modern paints can be termed organic. To play on a public perception that using the term organic implies that the ingredients are all grown or produced by suppliers who hold Organic Certification is misleading and dishonest.
This has been a lot of reading already but if you would like to dig deeper here are a few further sources.