Wooden furniture has always been the leader of the furniture industry. With the continuous enhancement of people’s awareness of environmental protection, more and more people are pursuing solid wood furniture. However, the failure of inspection for solid wood furniture, including excessive formaldehyde content, is always a hot topic in the furniture industry. In many cases, the main reason is the wood paint.
We all know that furniture is conmmonly divided into two categories: solid wood furniture and panel furniture. However, the texture of solid wood furniture is relatively weak. In order to prevent the deformation or cracking of solid wood, wood lacquer is needed for protection. And wood lacquer contains benzene series and other substances that are harmful to the human body. Therefore, wood lacquer and the environmental protection of furniture are closely related. Even solid wood furniture is not necessarily environmentally friendly.
But most people pay attention to appearance, price, etc. when choosing wooden furniture, only a few people pay attention to the paint finish of wooden furniture. If you choose the wrong paint, even pure solid wood furniture will release all kinds of harmful substances that are harmful to health.
So what is wood paint? Wood lacquer is all the coatings that can be used on the surface of wood, which can be divided into three categories: water-based paint, oil-based paint and wood wax oil. It has two main functions: one is to make the furniture beautiful, and the other is to protect the furniture from pollution or the effects of dry and wet changes. The surfaces of solid wood veneer furniture, multi-layer solid wood composite, three-layer solid wood composite, and pure solid wood furniture on the market are all painted (of course, they are painted at the time of production).
1. Water-based paint
Environmentally friendly water-based paint, is a paint with water as the dispersion medium, non-toxic and non-polluting. Regarding water-based paints, many people are prejudiced that water-based paints are inferior to oil-based paints in terms of hardness, abrasion resistance and scratch resistance. In fact, low-grade water-based paints use acrylic as the main raw material, and the performance is relatively low, which lead to a lot of complains for water-based paints.
The mid-grade water-based paint uses a composite of acrylic acid and water-based polyurethane as the main raw material, which improves the hardness, but the chemical properties (such as poor alcohol and alkali resistance) are still relatively low.
High-grade water-based paint uses acrylic modified water-based polyurethane as the main raw material, which has strong physical and chemical properties, and some indicators even exceed oil-based paint.
2. Oil paint
Solvent-based paints are paints that use organic solvents as the dispersion medium. Although the environmental protection performance is not good, oil-based paint still has many inherent advantages: low purchase price, good paintability, flexible coating film, good permeability… These are the main reasons for its high acceptance.
There are many types of oil-based paints. Including PU paints, NC paints, UV paints, PE paints are all oil-based paints.
3. Wood wax oil
The main component of wood wax oil is vegetable oil, and pigments such as iron oxide are used for color matching, which eliminates toxic and harmful volatiles such as benzene and formaldehyde from raw materials, and its environmental protection performance exceeds that of water-based paint.
And no matter from the perspective of manufacturing or use, wood wax oil consumes less environmental resources and is more beneficial to ecology and health. But one difference is that wood wax oil can’t hide defects. It has no hiding power, and will deepen the color difference of the wood itself, making the wood boils and other imperfections more obvious, but many people like this now.
How to tell if it is wood wax oil or paint?
Wood wax oil is an open coating method, it can fully display the details of the wood and retain the natural uneven texture of the wood, so the touch is relatively rough.
The paint will form a paint film on the surface of the wood, and when the paint film is thick to a certain extent, it will produce a higher gloss. So it feels smoother to the touch and looks glossier.
However, you can’t feel the natural texture of the wood when you touch it. Compared with the wood that is painted with wood wax oil, it will have a fake feeling.
All in all, needless to say about the degree of environmental protection: wood wax oil > water-based paint > oil-based paint.
