Air Quality: Colored Substrates vs. Painted

Indoor Air Quality is one of the most important environmental issues concerning building and designing interior elements. There are many strategies that can be used to reduce the amount of VOC's that are emitted into the air. One big and often overlooked strategy is to use materials and substrates that have inherent color as opposed to using materials that need to be colored via paint or some other VOC emitting process.

The material that gets chosen for a specific project may have may attributes that lead to choosing that material. With this being said, another material may be the more practical choice if a major step in the fabricating process can be eliminated by simply choosing another material with inherent color.

Example: An 1/8" clear tactile sign face is mounted to a black back plate. A typical approach may be to use clear Acrylic with black paint applied. An alternative approach would be to use another substrate that is available in black such as a black sheet of ABS.

ABS can be used as an alternative to standard Acrylic and is available in many standard solid colors. ABS also has many other environmental benefits compared to Acrylic such as the recyclability of the material.