When talking about Garry Grant’s contributions to keeping vehicles corrosion free and beautiful, you have to peek beneath the surface to the award-winning and sustainably advantaged pretreatment and electrocoat products that he helps create as our global market manager for Substrate Protection Systems.
Develop Products that Customers Want
Named by a mother who loved the actor Cary Grant, Garry has been a rising star in his own right since joining us in 1997 as a development chemist immediately after obtaining his bachelor’s degree in chemistry. Through the years, he’s held technical manager positions in decorative coatings, electrocoat (e-coat), resins and more while also obtaining an MBA. He moved into his current role in early 2022, overseeing a four-person team that bridges our commercial and science and technology functions to bring new substrate protection systems to market.
My team and I manage our portfolio of pretreatment and e-coat products that are used on automobiles and various industrial products. A major responsibility is to identify gaps in the portfolio through customer interaction and research and then initiate projects to fill them. We help ensure that what’s being worked on in our labs is what our customers want and what we need in our product portfolio for the future.
It was in our labs some 60 years ago that we pioneered e-coat technology, which is now ubiquitous throughout the global automotive industry. Rather than spraying a coating onto a pretreated metal part or dipping the part in liquid paint, electrocoating involves immersing the part in a water-based solution that contains charged paint particles. An electrical current passes through the bath, attracting and depositing the paint particles onto the metal surface and forming a strong chemical bond once cured.
In combination with pretreatment, the e-coat provides a protective barrier against corrosion and sets the base for a decorative coating, such as a car’s topcoat, to better adhere and maintain its aesthetic.
Cooling a Sustainability Hot Spot
Electrocoating was delivering sustainability benefits decades before sustainability entered the global consciousness. This water-based solution reduces coating waste due to its high transfer efficiency rate. It has relatively low levels of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and also reduces water usage by generating its own rinse water to enable a closed-loop process.
Customers are now looking for the next e-coat breakthrough in energy consumption, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and water usage to help meet their own sustainability goals. One hot spot is the curing oven, which is a major consumer of energy in many manufacturing operations and one of the largest in a paint shop. Customers are relying on us to develop products that reduce their energy requirements and minimize their emissions without slowing throughput.
Accelerating the challenge is the rise of electric vehicles (EV), which use heavier and more dense metal structures for components like battery trays. These structures require either higher temperatures or more time to cure in the oven, increasing both energy use and emissions.
Cue our chemists, who developed and optimized resins that allow our latest e-coats to be cured at the same or lower time and temperature without sacrificing performance. These include our PPG ENVIRO-PRIME® EPIC electrocoats for OEM automotive applications and PPG POWERCRON® 10X® electrocoat for automotive parts and other industrial applications.
At the Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada North Plant in Cambridge, Ontario, Canada, the use of Enviro-Prime EPIC 200X electrocoat earned a prestigious 2024 Altair Enlighten Award as the runner-up in the Sustainable Process category. On an annual basis, the breakthrough product is saving the facility:
Not to be upstaged, our Enviro-Prime EPIC 300 coating received an American Chemistry Council 2024 Sustainability Leadership Award. This product can be applied to heavy EV assemblies using less energy and heat, reducing energy input by 11% to 13% and lowering GHG emissions.
“These awards indicate that we’re developing the right solutions and partnering well with our customers to ensure mutual success. The industry also recognizes the benefits of these technologies in meeting market needs.”
It’s a Marathon, Not a Sprint
While Garry’s short-term focus will be on bringing these new and expanded bake e-coat technologies to the broader market, he and his team members aren’t taking their eyes off the future. They’re already exploring bigger sustainability questions, such as how to compress the footprint of paint shops or simplify the coatings process while enhancing corrosion performance to keep cars on the road longer.
While these are professional goals, Garry has personal reasons for driving sustainability advances.
“I started running about 10 years ago when a coworker encouraged me to get out of the office, and I got to the point where I did a full marathon. I’ve really developed an appreciation of the outdoors through running, and I want to keep the parks and trails where I run vibrant. I don’t want the products we and our customers produce getting in the way of that.”