Deepak Parameswaran argued that a façade coating's sustainability is inseparable from its durability, architectural powder systems warranted for 15 to 30 years resist weathering and corrosion, cutting the repair, replacement and material waste incurred over a building's life.
Deepak Parameswaran spoke on the day Jotun turned a hundred, counting from Norway in 1926: now more than ten thousand people, forty manufacturing plants, seven research facilities, and coatings on fourteen of the world's twenty tallest buildings, the Burj Khalifa among them. The company began in marine coatings, which is a useful thing to know about a business that now sells façade powder, because the argument he made is a marine one. A coating is sustainable to the extent that it lasts.
Three specifications, three guarantees
Durability for aluminium coatings in India is set by the AAMA specifications, and the product range maps onto them one for one. AAMA 2603 is the prevalent grade, sold as a 15-year guarantee. AAMA 2604, which the market is now adopting and which most critical and iconic projects specify, carries 25 years. AAMA 2605, the harshest of the three, carries 30.
At the top grade the comparison is not with another powder but with liquid PVDF, and the similarities stop early. Both meet 2605 and both use a fluoropolymer resin. After that: one coat at 50 to 70 microns against two or three coats reaching 45; low VOC; cheaper to apply, because a single coat is a single pass; and 30 years of guarantee against 20 or 25.
What a guarantee actually covers
Three things, each for the full term: colour retention, gloss retention and the integrity of the film itself. Which raises the question of how a coating maker can promise that about work it does not carry out, and the answer is the approved applicator programme. Jotun audits the applicator's process and equipment, and the applicator has to pass long-term testing at the regional laboratory in Dubai, including the acetic acid salt spray test, which is about the harshest thing a powder coating is put through. Only then is the certificate issued.
The numbers give the scale of that filter. Out of the thousands of applicators in the Indian market, about thirty are approved: roughly twenty-six for the 25-year grade and seven for the 30-year one.
The building that has now run the full term
The Burj Al Arab was coated in 1998 with the 25-year, AAMA 2604 grade, in the middle of the sea and in desert conditions. The entire guarantee period has now elapsed. A master panel was retained from the start, and when the coating was last measured against it in 2017 it was still intact. It is among the first projects to have crossed a full 25-year guarantee and still be standing good.
Colour that does more than colour
The finishes run to metallics, a fine-textured Sahara, wood effects, which are popular here, and cool shades. The last is the one with a performance claim attached: a pigment that reflects the heat falling on the coated aluminium, so less of it transfers inside, and the surrounding area gets less of the heat-island effect. No Indian project has used them yet, though Indian plants have supplied them abroad, including the Louvre Abu Dhabi.
The sustainability case for powder is partly just chemistry: no solvents, under 2 per cent VOC, and compliance with most of the green standards a specifier is likely to be working to. The rest is the reference list, which for these grades runs from Cybage IT Park in Ahmedabad and DLF Downtown in Chennai to Mumbai airport, the Common Central Secretariat in Delhi, ITC Greens in Bangalore and Google's Hyderabad campus.