The sorting of recycled paint at Swan Island is a blur as workers dump out cans.
Like caricatures of abstract painters, the men in the yellow hazmat suits work quickly, practically tossing cans of paint into sinks, a flurry of color with a room for a canvas.
Thus begins a new life for old paint. Each year, 325,000 gallons of paint — half of an Olympic swimming pool — go through the elevated room in a warehouse, dumped in one of more than a dozen basins, and drained into massive tanks that hold the nascent goop that will eventually cover a wall, ceiling or furniture.
Every time you buy a gallon of paint in Oregon, you’re also paying 75 cents to dispose of it. Much of that paint ends up at the MetroPaint warehouse on Swan Island, ready to be either processed or trucked 150 miles to the Columbia Ridge landfill.
The sink room
The warehouse is jam-packed with buckets of paint. They’re stacked like masonry near all the walls – buckets ready to be sold, buckets ready to be recycled, empty buckets waiting to be filled.
Many colors of recycled product add up to make the shades of MetroPaint.
In the center of the warehouse is Courteland Benson’s domain. He’s spent about three years working in the sink room, where paint is sorted and dumped. It’s noisy and cold in the room, and the workers wear ear plugs and are covered head-to-toe.
As cans are hoisted into the room on pallets, the crew uses a modified can opener – originally designed for restaurants opening tubs of tomato sauce – to open the paint cans. They’re then mixed before being flipped onto metal grates on top of the sinks.
Benson said the process of choosing what color goes in what sink is a bit of an art.
“You have to learn what colors it takes to make colors,” Benson said. For example, if there isn’t much paint coming in, a little orange or green into the brown paint sink can help keep things consistent. A can that isn’t dark enough to be espresso, but too dark for tan, could end up split between the two sinks.
The room is scrubbed often, with the central table scraped to bare metal four times a day.
Hoses connect the sinks to 300 gallon tubs underneath the sink room. Once the tubs are full, they’re hauled to a filtration and mixing system, where the colors are tested and refined.
From the tubs to testing
Workers originally used a modified irrigation filter to sift the crud out of recycled paint. It wasn't an ideal situation.
"It got so bad that rental companies, if they found out customers were going to spray MetroPaint – no deal," said David Schaleger, an operations specialist at the warehouse. In 2002, a new 300 micron filter was installed.
After the paint is filtered, it's Schaleger's job to make the batch perfect. Samples are tested for viscosity, purity and opacity. A color sample is worked to ensure consistency.
Facility supervisor Andrew Staab said a new system, put in place three years ago, guarantees a virtual match from batch to batch. Schaleger will smear a sample of paint on a sheet with the background of the perfect color. He'll then add bits of other colors of paint until the match is perfect.
Staab holds up a grey sheet with about eight smears on it. At first glance, they're virtually indistinguishable from the background.
"But you can see here, it's a little pink, and it gets closer and closer and closer," Staab said. After figuring out the correct ratio of other colors to add to the batch, the paint is re-mixed and poured into buckets.
"If someone wants to paint their house this color, and then they come back in a week or six months and we ran out of that batch, we could use another batch and it would be very difficult to determine where one batch started and another ended," Staab said. "We tell them if you go to a corner, you could never tell."
Further testing is done on some batches of paint certified by Green Seal, a sustainability-oriented nonprofit. The Green Seal paints include a clay-based substance that prevents mold, and are guaranteed for five years.
On the retail end
At the front of the MetroPaint retail facility, a room painted with color samples serves as the retail hub. But that's not the only place MetroPaint is sold.
In the summer, Miller Paint buys about $4,000 a week worth of MetroPaint for sale at its outlets. Some Fred Meyer stores also sell Metro's recycled paint.
Mountains of paint cans await to be loaded into the sink room and emptied.
This is expected to be the first fiscal year in which MetroPaint turns a profit, in part because of a surcharge paid when Oregonians purchase a can of new paint at the store.
Alison Keane, vice president of government affairs for the American Coatings Association, said the paint industry supported Oregon's paint disposal regulations.
"It is a proactive program to help divert paint from landfills with a sustainable financing system that fairly apportions the costs amongst paint manufacturers," Keane said. California is set to implement a similar program next year, with Connecticut and Vermont also considering paint disposal systems.
Still, Keane said the jury's still out on whether recycled paint is ideal for consumers. For example, new paint can have limits as low as 50 grams of VOCs per liter. MetroPaint recently tested at 117 grams per liter, and the federal standard for recycled content paint is 250 grams per liter.
There's also differing opinions, she said, on whether recycled paint performs as well as new paint.
Jim Quinn, manager of Metro's Hazardous Waste Program, said there are few complaints about Metro's products. Many of the more predominant complaints, about the smell, thickness and color matching, have been addressed.
"That's going to happen with any paint," Quinn said.
But customers shouldn't forget what paint they're buying. Nobody knows what's going into MetroPaint better than Benson, who's dumping the original buckets into the sinks upstairs.
"You're mixing Behrs and Ralph Laurens," he said. "That, to me, is a quality product."