December 18, 2025
“Sustainability sits at the heart of our business”
Lucy Dixon caught up with AkzoNobel’s Peter Howard to talk sustainability.
What are your main priorities for sustainability at the moment, when it comes to your trade customers? (Both specifiers and decorators)
Our trade customers, whether decorators, contractors or specifiers, are increasingly demanding the same thing, high quality more sustainable paints. In fact, 71% of decorators say clients now regularly request more sustainable paint. What this demand often centers on is products with green building certifications and carbon reductions. Our main priority is ensuring as many Dulux Trade and Armstead Trade products can help deliver this as possible.
A great example of this is reducing solvents (VOCs) across our product ranges. Solvents remain a major contributor to paint’s environmental impact, here we’re innovating to cut VOCs wherever possible. Dulux Trade favourites like Supermatt, Vinyl Matt and Diamond Matt are now 99.9% VOC-free, and our water-based trims, such as, Quick Dry Undercoat, Gloss and Satinwood ranges cut drying times by over 75% and reduce impacts on indoor air quality. These formulations deliver the same high-quality finish professionals expect, while having a lower environmental impact than traditional paints.
How important is testing for your new products?
As the UK’s leading paint brand, Dulux is trusted by decorators and DIY-ers alike so it is vital we ensure that they can rely on us to provide consistent, top performing, and high-quality products. We are constantly innovating and finding new solutions to support decorators, utilising our expert in-house Research & Development team at AkzoNobel. Alongside rigorous laboratory testing, we also ensure that all products are fit for purpose.
That’s why we introduced Tested & Approved where each product gets put to the test by professional decorators in three stages:
- Blind assessments by a member of the internal Dulux panel of professional decorators.
- Assessments by a panel of external professional decorators, also in a blind test.
- Field trials putting the product to the test under external conditions.
This is a true mark of trust that gives customers added reassurance of the quality of a product for any project.
You’ve already tackled a lot as a business for your environmental footprint, what achievements are you most proud of?
We are proud that sustainability sits at the heart of our business: AkzoNobel’s Paint the Future initiative places sustainability-driven innovation as a key pillar. We have already made some great progress towards achieving our ambitious sustainability goals, with 100% of purchased electricity used in our UK own operations being renewable and a 41% reduction in Scope 1 carbon emissions in 2024 (vs 2018 baseline).
Earlier in 2025, we were really proud to have launched our first 100% electric trucks based in Slough and improved our urban trailer fleet with a nationwide deployment of hydrotreated vegetable oil (HVO) biofuel. This cut the company’s radial fleet transport emissions by over 50% and saved approximately 3,000 tonnes of carbon emissions annually. This was a huge achievement for us and a big step forward towards our SBTi to reduce Scope 1 emissions by 50% by 2030, against a 2018 baseline.
Alongside this, through Dulux, we have the Let’s Colour initiative which drives the brand’s mission to bring communities together through the power of paint by working closely with our partner organisations across the globe. Some of these include: our sponsorship of Community RePaint, which has redistributed over 5.4 million litres of paint since its inception; and Volunteer It Yourself, which has positively impacted over 120,000 lives and helped train over 2,360 young people in painting and decorating. Since 2020, Dulux has transformed over 300 spaces across the UK, positively impacting more than 200,000 lives through Let’s Colour. The revitalisation of Langley Pavilion Community Centre as part of Dulux’s Let’s Colour initiative with Viva Slough is just the latest in our incredible and meaningful work.
