It’s a rare household that does not have a rusting tin of paint sitting around in a dark cupboard somewhere. About 55m litres of paint go to waste in the UK every year, which is why one organisation is trying to create a circular paint economy by recycling it.
Community RePaint is a UK-wide paint reuse network that collects leftover paint from drop-off points and redistributes it to individuals and groups in the community. They started in 1992 as a research project in Leeds called the Waste Wagon, led by a consortium of waste and recycling organisations and set up in response to concern from the local authority about the high cost of paint disposal and issues around household hazardous waste. The goal was to find out how many homes had paint to dispose of, and how much.
Researchers went out to knock on doors, and according to David Squire, Community RePaint’s community network coordinator, they found that “on average, 17 tins of paint were sitting there unused”. So they decided they would collect it. A year later, the pilot project for Community RePaint was set up, and three decades later, 100 people staff the UK-wide network.
Growth is gentle, but now “businesses have started to reuse paint in the community”, says Squire. The organisation is bringing recycling centres on board, a critical node in the paint-gathering network.
One by one, barriers are being broken down. For example, many local councils do not accept liquid paint for recycling because it is considered hazardous. Although this is done, in principle, to protect the environment, it actually increases the likelihood of people leaving their leftover paint to waste. Community RePaint wants councils to see accepting paint as a “win-win” situation. “We’re trying to change more councils to accept surplus paint … it saves council money as reuse is far cheaper than disposal.”
For the past decade, Community RePaint have sold their own brand, WeColour, which is made up of 97% recycled paint, made by separating the collected paint and remixing it. It’s currently the cheapest paint you can buy in the UK while, Squire says, “still having the good quality of major brands”.
They sell to schools, gardeners and community-led projects in particular. The network recently supported the pollinator pathway project in Bristol and a forest recycling project in east London.
They’ve also been behind some distinctive street art, working closely with the street artist AlecLDN (real name Alec Saunders) to make the longest eco-mural in the UK, using their preloved paint. Saunders covered Dugdale art centre in Enfield with a mural that showcased the diversity of the area’s history, including portraits, musical notes and filming equipment, and followed that up with a 77-metre mural in Union Park, the first major park to open in the Wembley neighbourhood for 150 years, celebrating the Wembley population with portraits of people from the area, picked by a selected panel. “It was also intertwined in flora and plants,” said Saunders, “since the park itself is filled with flowers specifically planted for bees to pollinate.”
He points out that: “People think reused paint will be dirty, but the quality was better than fresh paint that I’ve used. With their paint I just had to use one layer, while with others you need multiple layers.”
Although sponsorship from Dulux is helpful, Squire admits it is financially difficult to make the network completely UK-wide: “Our mission this year has been to grow the network so that we are operating across the whole of the UK, but we are still short on resources.”
It feels, he thinks, like an idea that should be catching on. “People know places to get secondhand clothes, like Depop and Vinted, but they don’t really think of that for paint.” Reuse and recycling is slowly becoming mainstream, but it is still slow to take hold. “The government has struggled to produce a ‘bottle return’ scheme, which has been on the agenda for 10 years. We have to rethink waste as a resource, rather than a nuisance or something to get rid of.”
To Squire, a circular economy is the key – an economic model in which resources and products are continuously reused, repaired and recycled. Though smaller organisations already do this, “it needs to be bigger and pushed more because it could transform society as a whole”, he says.
As long as paint wastage occurs in the UK, Community RePaint will continue its work. Squire is proud of their growing influence in communities: “This project shows that if you can, you just have to keep going and focus on community needs.”
