Page 272 - Design for Environment A Guide to Sustainable Product Development

248 Cha pte r T w e l v e

Pamplona, Spain assembly plants where the technology has already
been used to produce more than 250,000 vehicles for consumer sales
(see Figure 12.4). DuPont received the prestigious Automotive News
PACE award for this innovation and a second PACE award was pre-
sented to VW for the best OEM-supplier cooperation while imple-
menting this technology.
Paint line equipment and engineering can represent from one-
third to one-half of the initial capital investment in an assembly plant,
often ranging from $300–$400 million. Much of an assembly plant’s
investment in emissions abatement equipment is required in operat-
ing the paint shop. Additionally, while paint line operating costs and
inherent multistep processing have been viewed as essential to vehi-
cle quality and sales, the paint line has also been identified as a bottle-
neck to reductions in assembly time, requiring approximately 12 hours
of manufacturing time per new vehicle. Paint itself represents just
20% of the operating cost in the coatings operation.
®
The basic idea of EcoConcept is to add another paint component
which modifies the characteristics of the basecoat layer so that it
adopts the function of a primer-surfacer. The “primerless” system
uses multiple basecoats in combination with a reactive crosslinker as a
blending component. This eliminates one complete coating layer, the
primer-surfacer that is usually a solvent-borne product, and combines
it into a modified, environmentally compliant water-borne basecoat.
As a result, a spray booth and curing oven are eliminated, producing
a number of environmental benefits:
• Process energy and solvent emissions are reduced by approx-
imately 25%.
• Material consumption is lowered by approximately 20–25%.
• Greenhouse and acidification gases are reduced by approxi-
mately 30%.
• Paint shop total time and costs are reduced by approximately
20–25%.
• The overall supply chain footprint of automotive paint acqui-
sition is reduced by about 20% due to lower mass throughput.

Furthermore, DuPont estimates that adoption of this technology
will save customers about $60 million in plant construction costs and
from $3 million to $12 million in annual operating costs.