History

As our society is conscious of the problems generated by the disposal of millions of tons of waste in landfill sites, companies within the paint industry chose to assume their responsibilities with regard to the products they market, thus avoiding the disposal of paint residues and their containers in waste disposal sites.

In 1997, a business connection developed with Centre de formation en entreprise et récupération de Victoriaville (CFER), which, under the responsibility of Normand Maurice, had developed Peintures Récupérées du Québec, an organization involved in the project of recycling paint residues. Mr. Maurice, a teacher, an educator in the strict sense of the word, and most of all a great visionary, was concerned with the serious school dropout problems, as well as the deterioration of our environment and the enormous quantity of waste produced per day. This entrepreneur had understood that “new resources could be created out of waste”.

It is in 1998 that the members of the paint industry decided to take on the recovery and valorisation of paint residues on a voluntary basis, in the absence of a regulation, by financially supporting the CFER paint recycling project with an investment of 1.2 million dollars.

On January 1, 2001, the Government adopted the Regulation respecting the recovery and reclamation of discarded paint and paint containers established by the Environment Quality Act, thus creating the obligation for all businesses marketing architectural paint to recover, or have recovered, its residual material. In order to fulfill their duty, paint producers and brand owners, with the assent of the Ministry of the Environment, implemented the Société québécoise de gestion écologique de la peinture, or Eco-peinture. The corporation manages this system through a fee collected on each container of paint sold in Quebec, which is included in the sales price.