Sustainability

CEPE started its sustainability work in 2010 and published a Sustainability Charter in September 2012. The charter describes the policy the Industry will follow in the coming years, encouraging CEPE members to look at the full Life Cycle of their products while keeping in mind the three pillars of sustainability: People, Planet and Profit.

CEPE started working on the CEPE LCI project in 2011 to provide members from all CEPE sectors with harmonized life cycle inventory (LCI) data for the industry’s most important raw materials, and manufacturing processes. An Ecofootprint tool was also developed to allow companies to run simple calculations for their formulations. Both the database and the Ecofootprint tool are maintained on a regular basis since 2013.

Once data was available for raw materials and manufacturing processes, various CEPE sectors started to work on specific paint application scenarios, and CEPE joined the Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) project for the decorative paints sector.

In parallel to these projects, CEPE has provided its members with a series of supporting documents like glossaries, guidance documents or position papers, and a list of sources of data on paint.