Home & Living No nasties

Jo Percival meets the crew behind the Natural Paint Company.

IN AN ERA when many products are created using sustainable, natural and betterfor-you ingredients, the paint industry is lagging behind. Paint is still firmly attached to its petrochemical roots. Which is where the Natural Paint Company comes in.

Back in 2015, Christchurch-based James Mount and his partner Grace Glass decided to challenge the assumption that paint needs to be made using traditional and potentially toxic formulations.

“We realised there was a big gap between how other industries, like food and cosmetics, have begun to reflect sustainability and wellbeing values, but the paint industry was still stuck in the dark ages. It hasn’t evolved for a long time,” James says. “We knew that if we were going to be successful we had to be uncompromising with three pillars – health, sustainability and quality. People don’t paint their homes very often and when they do, they want to get it right.”

James and Grace engaged some of New Zealand’s best paint chemists and tasked them with creating a product that was as good as or better than the top paints on the market, while prioritising natural and renewable raw materials.

“There are two parts to our paint formulation,” James explains. “The first part is leaving out all the ingredients that you don’t need. A lot of traditional paints use fillers and chemicals to make the products cheaper.

“Then we asked ‘can we achieve the same quality, durability and washability by using more of the good stuff?’ The ‘good stuff’ is things like high quality plant resins or chalks and clays. By using more of that you get a much better product and you don’t need to add all the cheap chemical fillers.”

Today, the Natural Paint Company paints have some of the highest coverage rates in the industry. “We have a lot of professional painters who maybe don’t really care so much about the natural or health side of it but choose our products for the quality alone.

“Our paint is designed for people who aren’t professional painters. They’re very forgiving products in terms of application and ease of use. And obviously the smell and lack of chemicals is a really big thing. A lot of people feed back that the paints smell really nice.”

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