PPG Recognized as John Deere Supplier of the Year

Pittsburghbased PPG Industries’ industrial coatings business has earned recognition as the Enterprise Indirect Material and Services (IM&S) “Supplier of the Year“ in the John Deere Achieving Excellence Program. PPG was also awarded Partner-level status for 2013.

“Supplier of the Year” is Deere & Company’s highest recognition. PPG was selected for the honor in appreciation of its dedication to providing products and services of outstanding quality, its riskminimizing Secure Launch Excellence™ process and its commitment to continuous improvement. Courtney Jungjohann Deemer, Scott Leis, John Meincke, Kevin Braun and Chancey Hagerty accepted the recognition during formal ceremonies in Moline, Ill. PPG supplies electrocoat, liquid and powder coatings, and pretreatment chemicals to John Deere’s global operations.

Suppliers who participate in the Achieving Excellence program are evaluated annually in several key performance categories, including quality, cost management, delivery, technical support and wavelength, which is a measure of responsiveness. John Deere Supply Management created the program in 1991 to provide a supplier evaluation and feedback process that promotes continuous improvement.

In other PPG news, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) was awarded $224,000 to PPG to develop a new class of pigments for cool coatings.

The award is part of a $530,000 project that includes a $250,000 award to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) to partner with PPG on the research and $56,000 in cost-sharing by PPG.

While painting a metal roof white is the simplest way to keep the sun’s energy from heating a building’s interior, most consumers will do so only if the roof is flat. For sloped roofs, they prefer darker coatings that absorb more visible light, including many that also absorb more invisible NIR solar radiation. Because colors absorb more solar energy as they get darker, buildings with dark-colored roofs are warmer and more expensive to cool than buildings with white roofs.

To combat this problem, PPG makes products such as Ultra-Cool® coatings that reflect invisible NIR radiation, but dark Ultra-Cool coatings still absorb visible light energy that is ultimately converted into heat.

The goal of the PPG/Berkeley Lab program is to develop a more advanced class of dark-colored pigments that can convert a portion of the absorbed visible light energy into NIR energy that is radiated away from buildings.

How will this affect the powder coatings market? “We have customers fabricating coil into roofing shingles and spraying powder for special effects,” says Scott W. Moffatt, market manager, Building Products, Industrial Coatings, at PPG. “This DOE work could have some connections with a few powder customers but IR reflectivity would have to become bigger in the aluminum extrusion window market.”

For more information, visit www.ppgindustrialcoatings.com or call 888-774-2001.