OREANDA-NEWS. Fujitsu Limited and Fujitsu Laboratories Limited announced the industry's first in development of a water-based paint for use on the plastic chassis of servers, personal computers, and other ICT equipment. The new water-based paint is used on the front panels of the SPARC M10-4 and SPARC M10-4S in the SPARC M10 series of UNIX servers available in 2013.

This newly developed water-based paint uses two kinds of resin in a core shell structure, and tuning the volatility makes it possible to create adhesion between resin particles and enable painting at low temperatures. Compared to solvent-based paints, this cuts the use of petroleum resources by 54% and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) by 80%.

Fujitsu plans to expand the use of this kind of paint in its own products, such as servers and notebook computers, as a way to use natural resources more efficiently and reduce its environmental footprint.

Volatile organic compounds react in the air with light, and are one of the components leading to photochemical smog. VOCs are included in paints, printing inks, adhesives, detergents, gasoline, and thinner. About 40% of all VOC emissions are accounted for by paints, so reducing the amount of VOCs used in paint is an important issue in global environment conservation.

Paints are comprised of several materials: resins, which form a coating with pigments that produce color and luster as the components in the coating; and solvents auxiliary agents, which, as volatile components that do not form part of the coating, are included to thin the materials and help them cover more smoothly. Most of the VOCs in paint are in solvents, so an effective way to reduce use of VOCs would be to switch from a paint that uses solvents to dissolve the resin to a water-based paint that mixes the paint in water.