PaintCare seeks to give new life to leftover paint

Leftover paint is a nuisance waste that one nonprofit is hoping to remove from the waste stream and give it new life. PaintCare is a Washington, D.C.–based not-for-profit that established operations in New York state in May 2022. Today, the organization boasts 328 year-round drop-off sites and collects about 1.4 million gallons of paint every year. “It’s all just waste reduction,” says Kelsey O’Toole, PaintCare’s New York program coordinator. Historically, paint has been difficult to dispose of, environmental experts say. Latex paint must be properly dried out before it can be sent to the landfill where the bulky cans take up a lot of valuable space. Oil-based paint products are an even bigger disposal challenge, O’Toole notes, because they must be collected as hazardous waste. Often, people only have only a few windows of opportunity each year to properly dispose of paint when municipalities open waste collection for such items, O’Toole notes. “As you can imagine, those were inconvenient,” she adds, forcing people to hang onto old paint until one of the collection windows opened. With PaintCare, residents have another option, with 19 collection sites around Central New York available for them to drop off waste paint. Sites include a number of Ace Hardware locations, Sherwin-Williams stores, and numerous independent lumber and hardware stores. The nonprofit partners with paint retailers like hardware, home improvement, and paint stores to serve as collection sites where residents can drop off unwanted paint at no cost. PaintCare’s funding comes from a fee charged in states that have paint stewardship laws. Manufacturers pay the fee to PaintCare and then pass the cost to dealers by including it in the product price, according to the nonprofit’s website. In New York, that fee ranges from $0.45 for containers larger than a pint up to one gallon to $1.95 for containers larger than two gallons up to five gallons. What does PaintCare do with the all the collected paint? Most, O’Toole says, is blended to make “new” paint that is sold by their paint recycling partners. Oil-based paints are used for fuel blending. “They’re incredible,” she says of the recyclers. They pour off the paint by like colors and blend it to make new batches. “It just gets new life as paint again.” Much of the new paint is sold overseas, she adds. Since getting its start in New York, PaintCare has collected more than 46,000 gallons of paint in Onondaga County alone and more than 60,000 across Central New York. But that’s still just a drop in the bucket when considering the 4 million gallons of leftover paint each year in New York. Nationally, about 10 percent of all paint sold each year becomes leftover paint to the tune of about 840 million gallons. If PaintCare can help keep some of that out of the landfill, it’s just better for the environment, O’Toole says. “We want to make it convenient as possible for residents to drop off their paint and know it’s going to be disposed of properly,” she says. PaintCare also works to educate people about buying the right amount of paint in the first place to help further reduce the amount of waste paint. PaintCare, Inc., is a program of the American Coatings Association, a membership-based trade association of the paint-manufacturing industry. It operates in Washington, Oregon, California, Colorado, Minnesota, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Vermont, Maine, and the District of Columbia and is developing a program for Illinois. To date, the organization has collected more than 70 million gallons of paint.