Looking for graffiti solution? Here are some protective coatings that can help you.

Within any city, suburb or even more rural locations, we will always come across incidents of graffiti, which shows an unpleasant blemish of an area. Many companies around the world are introducing anti-graffiti resolutions that could be helpful in providing long-term solutions to the problem of vandalism on buildings, pavements and passageways. One of the solutions available in the market is anti-graffiti coatings, which is applied on top of the paint that already exists or on the facades of the buildings. These types of coatings prevent graffiti paints from getting stuck on the surfaces of the walls. The process saves a lot of money for the building owners as this culprit costs hundreds and thousands of dollars every year. There are different types of protective coatings available in the markets, each and every have its own advantages and disadvantages depending on the severity of graffiti.  Some of them are mentioned below:

• Sacrificial Coatings: This kind of anti-graffiti coating is applied on a clean wall and when applied, creates a type of barrier protecting the wall from being vandalized. If in case the graffiti affects the walls, these sacrificial coatings are removed with the high-pressure washer taking the graffiti along with it. The materials used in graffiti could be paint, pen or even blood. When the custodial staff comes to clean this mess, they remove both the coating and paint leaving the plain surface beneath. This clearly means that in order to avoid continuous re-application, a certain amount of graffiti has to be tolerated before the coating is stripped-down.

• Semi-sacrificial coating: These types of protective coatings are called as safety shield. This product protects the pores of the wall surface. Usually paint, felt or other kind of staining is removed twice from the surface before the coating takes away graffiti with it. For cleaning a safety-coated building, a combination of solvent and pressure washing is used.

• Permanent coatings: These are most effective in the areas facing chronic vandalism like in city centers, schools, tunnels etc. where scribblings and doodles are common. The cost of this anti-graffiti coating may seem high in comparison with less permanent solutions, but down the road, this option may seem low-cost against what might spend on re-coating. Fluorine and Polyurethane are some of the ingredients used in these types of protective coatings. Paint will not permanently stick to these substances. In this method, some manual labor and simple solvent is required to remove graffiti leaving the coatings and the original surface intact.

Apart from these chemical products, there are several green products making their way into the market. These protective coatings are water based and non-toxic. Some of them work so efficiently that certain stubborn stains come away with just using soap and water. Other products might require a little more effort with a few chemicals. But sighting the trend in eco-friendly cleaning solutions, there are high probabilities that even solvents would get replaced by gentle yet powerful cleaning products.