Key takeaways

• The use of plant-based raw materials is a way to reduce the  carbon footprint of a product.
• Carbon dioxide equivalent or CO2e is a way to measure the climate impact of a product.
• Many suppliers serving the coatings industry now produce Product Carbon Footprints (PCFs) for their materials, and several architectural coatings manufacturers have begun offering PCFs for selected products as well.

In recent months, both Behr and Sherwin‑Williams have energized the sustainable paint landscape with the launch of their new plant‑based offerings.  These developments inspired the writing of a piece of fiction to further elucidate how “plant-based” fits into the overall goal of reduced carbon footprint.

This month’s newsletter is a fictional story titled “More Than a Leaf on the Label.”

A fictional company launched its new biobased paint with the phrase “Contains Plant‑Based Ingredients!” on the label.   The label also showed a green leaf, a sunbeam, and a promise that this was the future of sustainable coatings.

Customers loved it. Retailers loved it. Even the sales reps felt good talking about it.

But inside the company, in a quiet corner of the R&D building, Maya the R&D sustainability lead, kept asking a question no one wanted to hear:

“What’s the CO₂e of the plant-based product?”

People shrugged. “It’s plant‑based,” they said. “Isn’t that enough?”

(Note: CO2e is carbon dioxide equivalent, which is the equivalent amount of CO2 to generate the same total global warming effect of all processes and raw materials that go into manufacturing the product.  It is a way to standardize the warming effects of different greenhouse gases that will be released upon the manufacture of that product.   CO2e is a way for a company to gauge the climate impact of their activities and a low CO2e is better than a high value.)

Maya knew better. She had spent months studying how agricultural inputs (example: pesticides require carbon-based feedstocks, high temperature processing and fuel for transportation), fertilizer use (example: nitrogen-based fertilizers can generate nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas), land use change (such as deforestation), and energy intensive processing could turn a “green” material into a surprisingly carbon heavy one. She had seen life cycle assessments where a plant-based polymer had a higher carbon footprint than its fossil-based counterpart. And she knew that climate targets didn’t care about marketing claims but did care about emissions.

So she started digging.

The first breakthrough came from a raw materials supplier who had just begun publishing Product Carbon Footprints (PCFs) for their monomers and paint additives. For the first time, she could see the actual cradle‑to‑gate (measures impact of all activities from resource extraction to when the product leaves the manufacturer) CO₂e of the plant‑based feedstocks the company was buying. Some had genuinely low carbon footprints and others did not. 

Then another supplier sent a full PCF for a bio‑acrylic monomer.  Suddenly, Maya could compare fossil vs. plant-based routes on equal footing, not by marketing language, but by kilograms of CO₂e per kilogram of material.

The picture became clearer: being plant‑based helps the overall CO2e picture, but only when the upstream emissions were well managed. The real sustainability story wasn’t the leaf on the label, it was the carbon math behind it.

Around the same time, a few forward looking paint companies began publishing PCFs for finished paints. Some used Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) to transmit their PCF information. Others released cradle‑to‑gate CO₂e values directly. It was still early days, but the trend was unmistakable: transparency was becoming a competitive advantage.

Maya brought all of this to the leadership team.

She showed them two versions of the same paint:

Version A: 45% plant‑based, but with high agricultural emissions and fossil energy use in processing.

Version B: 30% plant‑based, but sourced from low‑impact feedstocks with verified low PCF, and used renewable electricity in manufacturing.

Version B had a much lower CO₂e.

The room went quiet. That was the moment the company realized that plant‑based is a pathway, and reduced CO₂e is the destination.

They rewrote their sustainability messaging. They asked every supplier for PCFs. They began publishing their own. And they stopped treating “plant-based” as the finish line as it is one tool among many for reducing the true climate impact of their products.

This fictional account was meant to highlight why Product Carbon Footprints matter. Many suppliers serving the coatings industry now produce PCFs for their materials, and several architectural coatings manufacturers have begun offering PCFs for selected products as well.  

#ecomix #symmetry #behr #sherwinwilliams #plantbased #sustainable #innovation #carbonfootprint #renewable #chemicals #coatings #consulting

(photo credit: image generated by Microsoft Copilot)