Abdel Megeed, General Manager, Jotun, Abu Dhabi, spoke to Climate Control Middle East about how Jotun’s eco-friendly range of paints contributed to the improvement of indoor air quality and to the reduction in energy consumption of buildings or households.

Explaining that Jotun’s range of eco-friendly paints catered to both the external and the internal parts of a building or a house, Megeed spoke about Jotun’s Jotashield Extreme, which he claimed was suitable for building exteriors, saying that it was heat reflective and could reduce the penetration of temperature from the outside to the inside of a structure. “When you have this type of reduction in temperature, it automatically reflects into the energy consumption, when it comes to air conditioning and controlling the temperature inside the house, and many things,” he said.

He then went on to speak about Jotun’s solutions for the improvement of Indoor Air Quality. “When you apply the paint, the paint dries. How does it dry?” he asked, and explained that the liquid part of the paint would evaporate into the air, thus drying the paint. The liquid part could possibly be made up of water, chemicals or solvents. While the paint dried in days or a few weeks, it could keep on emitting VOCs even after drying. “This is something that people do not know. It may still take months after the paint dries that it continues to emit other compounds that contaminate the air,” he pointed out.

“Jotun, as a Norwegian company, has very high standard when it comes to indoor air quality, health and environment in Norway, which is perceived to be one of the most conservative countries when it comes to these areas,” Mageed said. He claimed that Jotun paints were low VOC, anti-asthma and non-toxic even after application, and lead chromate free. “Lead chromate is a very cheap pigment used to colour the paint,” he said. “At Jotun, we developed the technology of making colours with pigments free from lead chromate; we do not use lead chromate in our paints at all,” he said.