BASF Coatings has won the Sustainability Award in Automotive 2026 for its Overspray Free Application (OFLA) process, an overspray-free approach to two-tone painting. The award was presented in the ‘Technology: Operations & Supply Chain’ category, which honours tangible technological and process innovations that make a measurable contribution to sustainability by improving industrial operations and production processes. The award is jointly organized by the ATZ/MTZ Group (Springer Nature) and the management consultancy Arthur D. Little.
OFLA is a wet-on-wet process for two-tone vehicles. The contrast colour is applied with digitally controlled paint jets, producing a sharp paint edge without masking, enabled by BASF Coatings’ ColorSharp decor coat paint technology, engineered for overspray-free application. With tailored rheology and optimized flow and levelling behaviour, the paint is designed to support sharply defined jet-applied paint lines and helps avoid defects typically associated with conventional spray basecoats. Because the paint is placed only where needed, the process achieves 100 per cent transfer efficiency and eliminates overspray. For OEMs, this can reduce energy demand and CO2 emissions, cut masking-related waste and deliver process-level paint savings, while maintaining stable serial quality.
“The award underlines how process innovation, enabled by advanced paint technology, can fundamentally change the sustainability profile of automotive two-tone painting without the efficiency and resource penalties of conventional approaches,” head of global sustainability, automotive OEM coatings at BASF Coatings, Alvin Lao, said.
“The jury’s recognition highlights OFLA as a technology-driven solution that delivers measurable environmental and operational value for automotive manufacturing.”
OFLA is the result of close collaboration across the automotive value chain, combining BASF Coatings’ paint innovation and technology, Renault’s OEM manufacturing expertise, and Dürr’s advanced application and automation technology. At Renault’s Maubeuge plant, the OFLA two-tone process is deployed in serial production. Results show ~25 per cent reduced energy consumption (about 1.7 GWh/year), ~300 tons of CO2 reduction per year, elimination of ~300 g of masking-related, paint-contaminated waste per vehicle and ~200 g per vehicle of process-level paint savings by avoiding the second basecoat/clearcoat run required in conventional masking-based two-tone processes.
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