Project Recover: new life from old paint

This project will design better ways to get new life from old paint. Every UK household is estimated to have 17 tins of unused paint stored, while 50M litres of paint are said to go unused each year in the UK, wasting valuable and scarce resources or clogging UK landfills. Systems to collect, recycle and reuse this, turning into as-new paint for resale directly to the market, are already in their infancy, but face challenges and need scaling up. A particular design issue is finding an efficient and effective way to decant used paint from old tins for reprocessing, after their collections. This project aims to help the recycling and reuse of discarded paint, making it quicker, more efficient and cost-effective. The project will design a new system or mechanism to aid the removal and deacanting of old paint, thus helping the existing system to scale-up. In doing this there is the potential to avoid 60k tonnes of waste ending up in UK landfill.