Research and Scholarly Activity Fund Award Final Report
Name:

Sustainable Paint Practices

Department:

Fine Arts

Faculty:

Helena Wadsley

In no less than 350 words, please reflect on the status of the project for which you received an
RSAF award. You may wish to address: potential new avenues for the project enabled by the
award; how the funded project builds on previous projects and/or collaborations; any
publications, conferences, talks, classroom modules, etc., coming out of the funded project; the
outcomes of collaboration facilitated by the award; the potential for future research and scholarly
activity projects made possible by the award; or the funded project's impact on your activities in
general at the College. As this report will be posted on the Scholarly Activity website, please
submit an electronic copy.
The RSAF award final reports may also be published in the Research and Scholarly Activity
annual report. You will be notified of this and given final approval of content before publication.
You may also be asked to participate in events promoting research and scholarly activity at the
College.
Please write in the space below or attach an additional PDF page.

The research into sustainable paint and sustainable painting practices gave us valuable
information regarding paint disposal, which has been implemented since the beginning
of the fall semester. Whereas painting students were dumping dissolved acrylic paint, or
polymer, down the drain, we have drastically reduced the amount of these micro-plastic
particles from entering the water system. Additionally, as there has always been some
concern regarding the health and safety of paint in the studio which has limited the type
of paint used, the research project allowed us to test other types of paint besides acrylic.
Tests were done to determine suitability for the course curricula, testing alternative paint
types to see if they could allow students to fulfill the learning objectives for the painting
courses offered at Langara. While testing, we noted whether the paint had strong
odours or any other characteristics that would imply they could affect the health of
students. Research was also done on pigments, different binding media, such as
casein, walnut oil and an emulsified linseed oil by consulting MSDS sheets. In
conclusion, the most versatile paint alternative to acrylic is a walnut-oil based paint. It is
made without solvent and has the ability to be worked with in the diversity of ways
demanded by the curricula. The other paints we experimented with, which were chosen
for their less toxic qualities, were not versatile enough to meet our needs or off-gassed
in ways that would have been difficult to tolerate. Thanks to Andrew Mosi from the
Chemistry Department, we successfully tested a process for separating paint waste
from water so that we could pour clean water back into the water system and take the
paint waste to a recycling station off-campus.