In the last five years, the Earth's average global air temperature has been the highest in history. As a result, odd climate phenomena are occurring all over the world, such as increased turbulence and meteorological activity. Still, even with these dangers, people just don’t pay attention to bad news. They want to see something colorful.

As any high-schooler familiar with albedo can tell you, lighter colors have the property of reflecting more light than darker colors. For example, a dark asphalt parking lot absorbs much more light than even a lighter concrete surface, which explains why sitting on the blacktop during PE is extremely painful. For a whole building, a light color can make a noticeable difference on the interior temperature. By reflecting surface heat, the outside surface won’t overstress the insulation, which helps keep the interior cooler. That means heat can escape more easily through the windows and upward as it rises towards the roof. This can help save energy by reducing the use of air conditioning.

Furthermore, a large number of white roofs in a city can reflect more solar energy to lessen the overall temperature increase caused by darker paved streets. Nobel laureate in physics and former Secretary of Energy Steve Chu has supported the use of lighter colors for city surfaces, especially roads and rooftops, to reflect as much heat back into space as a practical way to prevent global warming. Actually all over the world, science and technology are showing that it is possible to implement a cool roof campaign. At the 2023 Orange County Sustainability Decathlon, the University of California, Irvine, engineering team LUCID included sustainable concrete and insulation into their green home design, choosing a white roof color with a rooftop vertical garden to soak up the sunlight. Their combination reduced the amount of construction material used without reducing building strength or heat exchange. While many scientists are continuing to develop sustainable alternative construction materials, others are focused on chemical coatings.

One way to reduce global temperature rise is in a simple thing found everywhere: white paint. In 2014, Vanta Black shocked the art world as the most light-absorbent black paint ever created. On the other extreme end, Professor Xiulin Ruan at Purdue University succeeded in creating an ultra-white paint in 2021. With a 98.1 percent reflectance, Ruan’s team beat their own previous record-setting formulation. Featuring the heavy ionic compound barium sulfate, Ruan’s paint uses the chemical structure of the compound’s various particle sizes to improve its reflective properties across a bigger range of the visible light spectrum. To sum up, Ruan’s ultra-white paint has an impressive reflectance level 18 points higher than the average white paint, which has 80 percent light reflectance.

Anytime research and development can make a percentage difference in performance, the results can be increased to achieve great change. With noticeably greater performance, ultra-white paint’s reflectance can directly lead to energy savings. In testing, buildings painted ultra-white recorded temperatures that were 7-13 degrees lower than ambient temperature. As Professor Ruan estimates, every thousand square feet of ultra-white coating can result in 10 kilowatt-hours of cooling energy saved, around the energy needed to light a bedroom under normal use for a month.

Will our world’s heating bill be solved by painting the roofs and roads white? Not really. However, we need to honor every small victory in improving our science because we clearly aren’t stopping our fossil fuels usage, especially with the holiday heating season coming soon. So, while we wait for the next great solution, maybe we can enjoy an ultra-white winter!