Partners
The impact of our paint and paper goes far beyond the walls of Farrow & Ball. Everyone involved in creating and using our products are partners in our sustainability story. We have a responsibility to encourage better choices and here are some of the ways we do that.
Ethical Supply Chain
Making the very best paint and paper possible starts well before the factory. That’s why we’re meticulous about who we work with. From sourcing raw materials to delivery, all of our suppliers have to follow our strict Code of Conduct.
Being a manufacturer puts us in a privileged position: we know exactly what goes into our products and exactly where it comes from, all the way back to raw materials. Not all paint brands make paint from scratch, they buy a base paint and add a colour tint. These brands are one step further away from the process and have to try and investigate how their suppliers’ suppliers behave.
Buying Better
The most sustainable way to decorate, is to not decorate often. So, we believe in decorating well.
That starts with choosing the right finish, so you don’t need to repaint as often. For example, our Dead Flat®, Modern Emulsion and Eggshell finishes have the highest possible scrub rating of Class 1. The next step is buying the right amount to avoid waste — we have a
and wallpaper guide to help.
We also curate our colours with a long-term approach. We don’t follow trends and add a hint of black pigment to most shades for a timeless look. Plus, we keep every colour we’ve ever made in our Archive, so they’re always ready and waiting if you want to refresh a wall, rather than repainting the whole room in a new shade.
Decorating Sustainably
One of the biggest environmental issues caused by decorating comes once the decorating is finished — how we clean up afterwards.
Rinsing brushes and rollers under the tap washes contaminated water down the drain and into the water system, which we want to avoid. Plus, the average paint roller has 200g of paint left on it after painting. This is what we recommend instead. Use a specific paint and roller cleaning tool to scrape all the excess paint back into the tin. This saves paint and halves how much water is needed to clean up. Then wash your tools in a bucket of cold, soapy water. Once they’re clean, rinse off the soap under the tap and leave the bucket outside in the sun (or in a warm place) so the water evaporates, and you can throw any leftover paint in the bin.
When you’re in between coats, you can simply scrape away the excess and then wrap your tools in aluminium foil, ready to use later on.
Left Over Paint, Wallpaper and Tins
According to the British Coatings Federation (BCF), ‘every year, 55 million litres of paint leftover from DIY and professional painting projects are sent to landfill or incineration in the UK’. We take our responsibility to help reduce that number very seriously.
We work with a number of national schemes to create new possibilities for unwanted paint: PaintCare in the UK, the American Coatings Association (ACA) and ProductCare in Canada.
We also have plenty of ideas for how to make the most of leftovers on our blog, The Chromologist. If you can’t find a use for your leftovers, give them to someone who can. Offer them to friends and family or take a look at paint re-use schemes in your area. You may also be able to recycle leftover paint (and because our wallpaper is plastic and vinyl free, leftover wallpaper too) at your local household waste recycling centre. If, as a last resort, you have to dispose of paint rather than recycle it, dispose of it responsibly by adding a paint hardener, sawdust, sand or soil to the paint and leave the lid off until it becomes solid and dry. If you’re in the UK, you can check for up-to-date information on the options in your area on the RecycleNow website.
Unopened tins of Farrow & Ball paint or rolls of wallpaper can be returned to us — as long as they aren’t from our Archive, as these are made to order.
Our metal tins are infinitely recyclable. And we mean infinitely. It’s estimated that 80% of all metal ever produced is still in use. They're also made from recycled content too, keeping even more material from landfill. Due to the way our tins are created, we can’t say for certain how much recycled metal is in our tins. However, metal recycling is so well established that currently 84% of steel packaging is recycled across Europe and 77% in the UK, making it the most recycled type of packaging available.
Looking For More?
Dive into the detail and read our Responsibility Report in full online. Or, head back to our sustainability homepage to browse another chapter summary.