By Bernhard Lembeck – ProNature Founder and Managing Director
Imagine, you are the boss of a wood coatings company in Germany losing tons of business to a natural paint company? Who are these guys and how dare they take business away from us?
This is exactly where my journey with and my passion for natural coatings began. I became obsessed with the idea to make paints not based on the raw material crude oil, a very finite source, but to make coatings from raw materials that are sustainable, non-toxic yet functional and comparative to conventional coatings. In 1997 we started ProNature in Cape Town focusing on coatings made from sustainable natural ingredients. ProNature main interest is in wood finishes and architectural coatings strictly adhering to the following “6 commandments”:
- Abandonment of crude oil based raw materials.
- Unobjectionable, non-petroleum based raw materials and their compositions for all living creatures.
- Problem-free integration of raw materials and their compositions into the natural cycle
- Raw materials from sustainable resources are preferred to synthetics.
- The growing and extraction and production of raw materials as well as the complete coating must follow ecologically sound principles i.e., least possible ENVIRONMENTAL FOOTPRINT
- All raw materials used must be declared in simple form on the product label.
Despite comments like: Come on Bernhard, you know how to make proper paints and now you come with this green nonsense, we persevered.
All our years of educational efforts, the birds and the bees story of green, sustainable chemistry so to speak, finally bore fruit when eventually big corporates recognised the benefits of true eco-friendliness as we were far removed from the greenwashing that had come about where all of sudden all companies wanted to become somewhat greener than they really were.
To our delight the green issue was further pushed along with the establishment of the Green Building Council South Africa and their demands for VOC free coatings (which we had introduced already years before) which was a wonderful recognition of our immense efforts.
And we shall not waver and will always strive to be the forerunners of guaranteed and truly sustainable, eco-friendly products as we live what we preach.