For those that don’t know, Blue Patch is made up of six hard-working women, three of whom are artists! This means that on average, there will be someone in our office thinking about paint at any one time. No wonder then that one of the first members to join us was New Life Paints – the most sustainable paint company around. They mix paint left over  from redecorating the nation’s kids rooms or downstairs loos back into their wonderful Reborn range to use once again. 

 

Why we do what we do:

Every time I talk to someone new and they ask me what our company does, they are amazed by the concept. It is so simple: ‘we take waste paint and re-manufacture it back into beautiful new paint’ and yet there still are millions of litres of paint going to landfills every year. The initial process was developed by my father, Keith Harrison, who was meant to be cleaning out the garage and upon discovering it full of paint tins, went searching for a way to recycle them. Finding that there was no current recycling option, he started research and development, which eventually led to our current technique.

 

Where we do it:

Our home base in West Sussex. We work out of the family home with a small factory base nearby for continued development. We no longer concentrate on recycling the paint ourselves, although we do still sell the Reborn range which we manufacture locally. Our main aim now is to expand the process across the UK and Europe so larger quantities of paint can be rescued from landfills.

 

 

What drives us on:

The thought that in the near future we could rescue all waste paint from landfill and it could be a completely closed loop operation:

leftover paint > remanufactured by us > remanufactured paint sold to customers > leftover paint returned to us for remanufacture

In order for this to happen, the purchasing of remanufactured paint needs to be as mainstream as any other.

 

 

What we’re working on:

At the moment we are researching colour matching in order to improve and speed up our current operation. Just recently, we completed a joint project which concentrated on the remanufacturing and speeding up the paint tin emptying procedure.

 

Soapbox Space:

We are a very small company. In fact, there are just three of us: myself, Linda and Keith Harrison (who are my parents). Due to the process being so pioneering, we have been in talks with some big names: we contribute to the UK government “All Party Parliamentary Sustainable Resources Group” and have helped put together the UK government 100 page book on Circular Economy. We helped establish the Circular Economy Paint Group with the UK trade body “British Coatings Federation”.

 

Blue Patch is Britain’s sustainable marketplace. We’re on the look out for potential businesses to become members. If you would like to come on board please contact the team, we’d love to hear from you.