Author: Sarah Perreard
The label nobody had seen before
On 17 October 2025, paint tins sold across the EU started carrying a line most buyers had never read before: a statement that the product falls under Entry 78 of the EU’s REACH microplastics restriction, alongside instructions for preventing the release of microplastics during normal use, including not washing residue down the drain.
Reporting obligations are now phasing in behind that label. Manufacturers supplying synthetic polymer microparticles as industrial feedstock had to submit their first emissions data to the European Chemicals Agency by 31 May 2026. Paint and coatings suppliers, whose products release microplastics through use rather than as a raw feedstock, sit in a later wave of the same restriction, with reporting obligations running through 31 May 2027.
This is new ground for the sector, and it comes with a chance to help define how the numbers get calculated, rather than have someone else define it later.
A capsule, a filter and a bucket
One of the first visible responses to this shift landed on the shelves of Akzo Nobel’s Dulux Decorator Centres across the UK a few weeks ago. Washbox Global, known for its closed-loop wash stations on construction sites, built a scaled-down version for home and trade use: the Micro Wash Kit. A filter sits over a standard paint bucket, and a dissolving capsule causes suspended paint solids to settle out of the wash water. Users pour the water through the filter, which captures the waste and allows it to dewater before being disposed of in the bin along with the filter.
Andrew Crimston, Washbox’s founder, built the kit as a practical answer to a specific question: what does a paint company hand a customer when its safety data sheet says do not discharge, but offers no way to comply.
“A label that says do not discharge doesn’t give anyone a way to comply. The Micro Wash Kit closes that gap for one product, in one channel. The real test is whether the industry can do the same thing for reporting: agree on one way to measure the problem, instead of every manufacturer guessing on their own.”
— Andrew Crimston, Founder, Washbox Global
That is one company, one channel, one region. Regulation, however, does not stop at retail kits. It asks something harder of manufacturers: can they put a number on what their products emit, at scale, across every market they sell into.
The report that saw this coming
This is where the story loops back further than October 2025.
In 2022, Earth Action, the research consultancy behind the Plastic Footprint Network, published Plastic Paints the Environment, a study commissioned by Pinovo, a Norwegian company that removes old paint from steel structures such as ships, bridges and offshore platforms without releasing it into the water. The report found that paint accounts for an estimated 1.9 million tonnes of ocean microplastic leakage a year, 58% of the global total, more than tyres, textiles and industrial pellets combined. Previous estimates had put paint’s share at 9 to 21%.
“This report should be a wake-up call for the paint industry. We need a systemic change in the use and management of paint, now that these findings have shone a light on the extent of the pollution being caused.”
— Declan McAdams, Chairman, Pinovo, on the publication of Plastic Paints the Environment, February 2022
The report reached the European Commission and helped put paint on the list of unintentional microplastic sources under review, alongside tyres, pellets and synthetic textiles. The 2025 and 2026 restriction milestones are, in part, downstream of that review.
There is a smaller, personal thread running underneath this too. Declan and Andrew know each other, though not through paint. Both came up through the World Economic Forum’s UpLink platform: Pinovo was a finalist in an early UpLink ocean challenge, and Washbox won a later cohort, Yes SF, in San Francisco. Two founders working on different pieces of the same pollution problem, introduced by the same network years before their industries collided on a shared regulatory deadline.
What compliance still doesn’t answer
Retail kits and safety labels address one part of the problem: giving individual users a way to act. They do not answer the question regulators are actually asking manufacturers, which is how much microplastic pollution their products generate in the first place, and how that number is calculated consistently enough to be trusted or compared.
This is the same gap that surfaced after the 2022 report. Regulators who wanted to act on paint microplastics ran into an obstacle Plastic Footprint Network hears in nearly every plastic-reporting conversation: companies say they cannot report on something for which no shared methodology exists. Without a common standard, a single manufacturer’s self-reported number is also an easy target, open to challenge from competitors, NGOs or regulators who calculate it differently.
Plastic Footprint Network is building that standard now, through a new Paint Module. The intent is not to keep the methodology limited to one company or one paint category: architectural, industrial and protective coatings each need their own module, developed with input from the manufacturers who actually produce them.
Major paint and coatings manufacturers now face the same phased ECHA reporting requirements. Manufacturers who join that work now help set the standard the rest of the industry will eventually be measured against, rather than reporting a number built without one. More on who’s already stepped up to help build it — next month.
Get involved
Plastic Footprint Network’s Paint Module working group is open to paint and coatings manufacturers who want to develop a shared, scientifically credible methodology for their product category. Get in touch at contact@e-a.earth or visit www.e-a.earth to read Plastic Paints the Environment and learn more about the methodology.