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Community Corner

Made on Cape Cod: ePaint

East Falmouth-based company ePaint makes eco-friendly boat maintenance products by developing and marketing non-toxic marine coatings.

Alex Walsh says he “sanded his fair share of boat bottoms” while working on the waterfront during his summers in East Falmouth.

But it was only after taking an environmental toxicology class at Clark University that Walsh, whose family came to the Cape in the early 1800's, became aware of the harm he might have caused himself and the environment by working on boats, breathing hydrocarbon solvents and sanding dusts.

He discovered that bottom paints are registered pesticides.

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Walsh says he questioned "how this socially accepted practice was permitted by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency,” especially when “young uneducated laborers [are] exposed to such toxic materials without truly understanding how this temporary employment can have life time consequences.”

These questions lead Walsh to turn his love for boating and concern for the environment and occupational health issues into a career, founding the ePaint Company with the mission of developing a product that would perform the same as traditional boat bottom paints without causing harm to people and the environment.

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ePaint began developing its original products with funding from the U.S. Navy in 1985, and formally opened up shop in East Falmouth in 1991. It was the first company to have an antifouling coating registered with the U.S. EPA that was free of copper and tin-based pesticides.

Since then, ePaint has developed specialty coatings for the U.S. Coast Guard, the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, the , the U.S Geological Survey, and private sector industries.

All ePaint products are free of copper and other biocides that persist in traditional antifouling paints and the environment. The main component found in all ePaint coatings is a unique patented photo-active technology. Energy from light is used to combine water and dissolved oxygen molecules to form hydrogen peroxide that blankets around the boat hull, creating a surface inhospitable to bio-fouling animal larvae such as barnacles and zebra mussels.

ePaint now produces 10,000 gallons of paint annually and employs five people, whom Walsh refers to as “a family of like-minded individuals.” They are responsible for manufacturing, marketing and developing their greenest products: EP2000, ECOMINDER, NETMINDER and SUNWAVE.

The users of the products, Walsh says, are “boaters, boat yards, marine chandleries, and distributors.”

Walsh says he likes to work exclusively with small businesses. “For this reason, you will never find a can of ePaint on a West Marine shelf,” he says. Most of the paint is sold in the Pacific Northwest, where, as Walsh says, “boaters care about the environment.”

In the future, ePaint will continue to focus its research and development efforts on moving away from solvent-based paint systems, and toward producing innovative water-based and low organic solvent marine vessel coatings—always with human health and the natural environment in mind. And always on Cape Cod, Walsh says, “because the Cape is home.”

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