Army AL&T: Tat must be tough to do.


Dirkx: What’s hard to do is to make the change. A number of your questions are about changing requirements. It’s hard when a customer has 30 years experience with a product—remember we have those test panels—they all have them, too, out in the sun. So when we come and want to make a change, they want to have some confidence that they’re not going to sac- rifice anything on the longevity. Yeah, it’s difficult.


Army AL&T: When you talk about these local VOC requirements, do you see reg- ulation coming down the line and say, “Okay we’ve got to prepare for this, we’ve got to be able to change the formulation so that we can meet these regulatory requirements?” How does that work?


Dirkx: Tat’s a big question. Tere was a time, whether we’re talking about the consumer space or the industrial space, where all paints were solvent-borne. You remember probably painting rooms and the odors were quite strong, and what you’re smelling of course is the vapor- ization of the solvents. Te industry, over a long period of time, has shifted more toward water-borne or water-based coatings.


And largely that was driven by regulatory requirements. So we could see that com- ing. And again, we’re not making paints, we’re making components in paints. But just the way I explained it to you a moment ago, that’s another important reason for us to have formulation capabilities, the same kind of capabilities our customer base has, in order to demonstrate that we could move our components—and by the way, this happened in baby steps. Te first thing you can do is go to lesser amounts of solvent. You have a mixture of solids and liquids in a gallon of paint. Te industry


TOWERING ACCOMPLISHMENT Liberty Place One and its sister tower, Liberty Place Two, completed in 1987 and 1990 respec- tively, help define the skyline of Philadelphia, PA. The glass exteriors of these structures are complemented by durable, Kynar-coated metal cladding.


ASC.ARMY.MIL


83


CRITICAL THINKING


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