Driving Sustainability and Efficiency in Collision Repair Shops
Key Highlights
- Sustainability in collision repair is increasingly linked to productivity, with energy-efficient processes reducing costs and environmental impact.
- Advancements in coatings and digital tools enable faster repairs, lower material waste, and improved cycle times, benefiting both shops and customers.
- Automation in paint mixing and calibration helps minimize errors, reduce waste, and ensure consistent quality, supporting sustainable practices.
- Energy-intensive areas like spray booths benefit from innovations such as fast-drying coatings, significantly lowering energy consumption and emissions.
- Shops should begin sustainability efforts by upgrading lighting, optimizing workflows, and learning from successful peers to build a more efficient operation.
A Q&A with Garry Grant, PPG customer sustainability business partner, Automotive Refinish
PPG’s Garry Grant brings more than 20 years of experience leading innovation, strategic growth and sustainability across the global automotive industry. He helps customers translate sustainability goals into greater operational performance and talks to us today about trends in North America.
How has the conversation around sustainability evolved in collision repair, especially in North America?
Garry Grant: In North America, the conversation is very different depending on where you sit. In parts of Canada and the U.S., like southern California, environmental regulations keep volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and emissions in focus. Other parts of North America have deprioritized these same topics, but sustainability is more than just regulation and emissions reporting. Products and processes that reduce the amount of time and energy required to complete a repair make the shop more productive and profitable. Regardless of where you are in the world, sustainability practices that enable productivity are good for business.
Productivity and sustainability go hand in hand. In much of the United States, energy costs are increasing. In fact, U.S. Energy figures show that energy costs have increased about 25% in the commercial sector and about 10% in the industrial sector over the past year. Shop owners feel that increased operating cost immediately. Spray booths, bake cycles, and HVAC systems consume a lot of energy. When natural gas and electricity prices rise, the impact shows up on the monthly utility bill — which shifts the view of sustainability from compliance and emissions reporting to optimizing operating costs. When you reduce energy and material use per repair, you improve both profitability and environmental impact.
What are the biggest misconceptions you see among shop owners?
Grant: The most common misconception is that sustainability means higher cost and more complexity. A sustainably advantaged product or process often aims to improve shop efficiency. For example, if a coating system requires fewer refinish hours, the vehicle spends less time in the booth, which reduces energy use and increases throughput. When a shop combines sustainably advantaged coatings with digital color tools and automated mixing systems that reduce rework, it can also cut materials, waste, and labor costs. These improvements in total can bring double-digit time and energy savings that strengthen the shop’s bottom line. For the end customer, their car is returned faster, improving customer satisfaction while reducing costs for insurance companies by shortening rental car durations while the car is being repaired.
When teams understand that sustainability advantaged technologies and solutions can improve productivity and cycle time, the resistance fades.
Where does energy efficiency show up most clearly inside a collision center?
Grant: The spray booth is one of the most energy-intensive areas. Traditional clearcoat systems often require extended bake times at elevated temperatures to achieve the right appearance and performance, which increases energy demand and limits the number of vehicles a shop can process in a day. Advancements in coatings help address the challenge. For example, PPG used artificial intelligence to help develop a fast-drying clearcoat that reduced post-spray-drying time from 30 minutes to 5 minutes when heated to 140 degrees Fahrenheit. One U.S. body shop processing 1,500 repairs per year could realize an annual energy reduction of about 18,000 kilowatt-hours from the shortened clearcoat bake time, which corresponds to roughly 4.5 metric tons of emissions reduction per year. The practical benefit for shops is that faster drying reduces booth time, lowers energy consumption, and increases throughput without sacrificing finish quality.
Shops may adopt these technologies to move cars faster and manage costs. The sustainability benefit follows that operational gain.
How does automation fit into the sustainability discussion?
Grant: Automation can improve both productivity and material control. Manual paint mixing introduces variability, and incorrect ratios can lead to remakes, while leftover material in bottles often becomes waste. Automated systems improve mixing accuracy and consistency, allowing technicians to focus on other tasks. This reduces mixing and color-match errors and limits unnecessary material use.
Let’s consider an automated paint mixing system. It can deliver consistent mixes up to 100% accuracy and helps extract more usable paint from each bottle. Historically, about 9% of paint waste remained unused in each bottle, contributing to waste. Automation reduces that waste and limits rework caused by mixing errors, improves color match accuracy, while supporting a cleaner workflow and more efficient use of technicians' time.
Again, the sustainability benefit results from greater process control.
EVs have generated a lot of headlines. How do they affect repair versus replace decisions today?
Grant: EV production strategies continue to evolve. Right now, the bigger day-to-day impact comes from advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). Today’s vehicles integrate radar, cameras and sensors into bumpers and body panels. After a collision, shops must perform precise calibrations to ensure those systems function properly. If a repaired component does not meet calibration requirements, it must be replaced, which can increase time and cost.
At the same time, advancements in plastic repair technologies give shops more options to restore components within OEM guidelines. When a component can be safely repaired instead of replaced, shops avoid the cost of a new part and reduce landfill waste costs. Decisions must follow OEM procedures and calibration standards, but improved repair capability supports both sound economics and responsible resource use.
For a shop just starting to think about sustainability, where should they begin?
Grant: Start with the basics and focus on what you can control. Shops can upgrade spray booths with LED lighting and review booth performance and cure times. They should also evaluate workflow to reduce unnecessary steps and rework.
Learn from shops that have already made changes and measured results. Most importantly, reframe the conversation internally. Instead of asking how to become more sustainable, ask where time, energy, and materials get wasted in the current process.
When you build a more productive shop with greater energy efficiency and less waste, the sustainability benefits will come along for the ride.
For more, visit here.