Sustainability Initiatives in Wales

SPECIFIC (Sustainable Product Engineering Centre for Innovative Functional Industrial Coatings) is a Welsh government initiative – one of six Innovations and Knowledge Centres (IKCs) in the UK – focused on functional coatings on roof, wall and ceiling building materials.

Value-add coatings include: heat producing coatings, carbon capture coatings, anti-pollutant coatings, light enhancing coatings, cooling coatings, energy storage coatings, and energy generating coatings – photovoltaic coatings are just one type of the energy generating coating being researched at SPECIFIC. SPECIFIC’s first major project is focused on water purification industrial coatings.

Partners at SPECIFIC include some of the world’s largest building materials companies, including Tata and Pilkington.

“The involvement of these major industrial partners confirms the potential of the smart buildings space as an attractive place to innovate in terms of long term rewards.” said Dyesol executive chairman Richard Caldwell.

“Industrial coatings with energy storage capability is synergistic with renewable coatings such as PV,” said SPECIFIC chief executive Kevin Bygate.

The £20 million SPECIFIC project announced at Baglan is not a major focus of Dyesol – DSC enabled coil coating or roll-to-roll steel R&D activities remain based at Shotton in North Wales where Dyesol co-locates and collaborates with partner Tata Steel Europe at the PV Accelerator plant. The focus of this activity is: 1) value-adding DSC energy generating technology onto coil coated steel, and 2) the achievement of product grid-parity where the market opportunity is very significant in size.

“Dyesol is the exclusive global partner of Tata Steel Europe in the field of DSC research and development and DSC materials supply.” said Caldwell. “Work on the DSC enabled steel roofing project is continuing to move ahead towards global industrialisation at the PV Accelerator in Shotton.”