Eco Art Supplies: How green is your studio?

As a painter and a long time nature-lover, I try to shun the pangs of guilt when painting, not for the art I am creating, but for the resources I use and toss away after the creativity burst subsides and I am cleaning my California studio. I began to wonder if it is worth supporting the standard style of creating art, with paint, paper, and canvases.
I turned my eye to the paint manufacturers and decided to do an investigative piece on what seems to be the best of the best at being green and still produce quality paint. I chose Golden Artists Colors. I started by making the trek out to their paint factory. Because the elder Golden restarted his paint manufacturing career after he retired upstate NY, the large Golden paint factory grew in the middle of a bucolic country setting, surrounded by 10-foot tall waving sunflowers.
There every worker has some degree of haz-mat costuming, from simple goggles to full white, zip-up suits. They hired an efficiency expert to streamline production floor work habits, filter all their water run-off for re-use, and hood any bin that could waft pigment powder into the facility. They take it a step farther and go to the county hazard waste recycle center to pick up all wet paint. Back at the factory, they reconstitute acrylic-based paints into house paint then repackages it into 5-gallon buckets for donations to whomever needs free house paint. The oil-based paint gets re-routed to an incineration facility that reclaims the generated heat as energy.
There is also a page on their web site to help the studio artist stay environmentally safe, when using their paints. A paper posted on their website, goldenpaints.com/justpaint/jp3article3.php, shows you how to assemble a fairly simple water filter to clear out paint solids from your rinse water. Great! That assays my initial pang of guilt. I can remain a painter and not sully my local water plant with dirty rinse water.
Golden Artists Colors is not trying to become the poster-child for eco-friendly paint manufacturers. They are just trying to be good corporate neighbors and employers. Mark Golden said, “This is the right road to sustainability,” and after all, isn’t that what is at the essence of living in harmony with the world?

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