Safety Requirements and New Development Tendency of Textile Auxiliaries Chemicals

Safety Requirements and New Development Trends of Textile Auxiliaries Chemicals

The safety requirements of textile auxiliaries chemicals are the necessary indicators for the selection of auxiliaries chemicals in the textile industry. It describes the basic safety requirements of textile auxiliaries at present: (1) VOC-free (nonvolatile organic compounds); (2) No FA or low FA (No formaldehyde or low formaldehyde); (3) No DS (no risky chemical substances); (4) No EH (no environmental hormones); (5) No PFOS and no PFOA (no perfluorooctane sulfonate , no Acylate and perfluorooctanoic acid); (6) No AOX (no adsorbable organic halides), The development tendency of the demands of the market in textile safety has also been put forward, further elaborated the new trend of the prohibited and restricted textile chemicals in the textile auxiliaries chemicals: (1) There is a more stringent restrictive requirements of polyhalogenated dibenzo-p-dioxins and polyhalogenated dibenzofurans; (2) Fluorinated greenhouse gases are banned; (3) New restrictions on flame retardants and so on.

Safety requirements and new development tendency of textile auxiliaries chemicals.

During the textile production process, a variety of chemicals will be used, whether by floristic analysis or quantity analysis, the most used is textile auxiliary chemical. According to incomplete statistics, the current annual output of the world's textile auxiliaries is more than 4.5 million t, A total of nearly 100 categories, about 16,000 varieties, the annual consumption is around 4.3 million t. In these textile auxiliaries, many varieties contain harmful chemicals or will produce harmful chemical when used in practice, which will do harm to both human health and ecological environment. When people use or wear textiles or garments  that containing these textile auxiliaries chemicals, the harmful substances residue in the textile products will cause harm to human health and the ecological environment, that’s why so many countries and organizations all around the world conducted a detailed toxicology and ecotoxicological study on various textile auxiliaries chemicals, and promulgated the regulations ban prohibited and restricted textile auxiliaries chemicals, mainly in the Europ.

To give a roughly estimates of the prohibited and restricted textile auxiliaries chemicals on the market all over the world, the current prohibited and restricted textile auxiliaries chemicals on the international market have already exceed more than 18 categories of nearly 3,000 varieties. Although they are focused on the eco-textiles which is in term of the Safety and ecological requirements of textile auxiliaries chemicals, but in accordance with the requirements of the international market, the general textiles can not contain harmful chemicals, otherwise, they are still safety failure or quality failure product  no matter how high the technical quality is.

The basic safety requirements of textile auxiliaries chemical at present

In today's international market, the textile industry has put forward a stronger demand for the safety and ecology of textile, regardless of how different the requirements of various certification system and textile companies can be, in order to facilitate the identification and purchase of consumers, there are some basic requirements of the safety of textiles, which is to meet the following six aspects:
(1) VOC-free (non-volatile organic compounds);
(2) No FA or low FA (no formaldehyde or low formaldehyde);
(3) No DS (no hazardous chemical substances);
(4) No EH (no environmental hormones);
(5) No PFOS and PFOA (no perfluorooctane sulfonate and sulfonylate and perfluorooctanoic acid);
(6) No AOX (no adsorbable organic halide.)

This is also the domestic and foreign market’s basic safety requirements of textile auxiliaries chemicals, that is, for the environmental protection and human health in general, textile auxiliaries chemicals should not contain VOC, FA, DS, AOX, EH, PFOS and PFOA.

In recent years, the inspection of textiles in China has found that a considerable part of problems are related to the environmental hormones, top of the list is alkyl phenol polyoxyethylene ether (APEO) which directly associated with environmental hormone alkyl phenol; second place go to environmental hormone phthalate esters compounds, which are mainly used for coating finishing, soft finishing, plastisol printing and coating dyeing, etc. At present, China's annual output of phthalate compounds is very large, about 150 Million t, the apparent consumption is 1.4 million t, the usage amount was very large, although some substitutes have been developed such as polyol benzoate, but the performance still needs to be improved; the third place went is organic tin compounds of environmental hormone, including butyltin trichloride (TBT), tetrabutyltin (TeBT), tricyclohexyl tris (TCyHT), octyltin (MOT), dioctyltin (DOT), trioctyltin (TOT), butyltin (MBT), dibutyltin (DBT), tributyltin (TBT) (TPHT), tripropyltin (TPT), and so on. There are six varieties, DBT, TBT, TCyHT, TOT, TPhT and TPT, when use catalyst, polymer stabilizer or in the anti-corrosion coating in monomer polymerization they will be brought to the textile, but they are no longer used as a fungicide for textiles.

Obviously there is still a certain degree of difficulty to reach no EH in textile auxiliaries chemicals, we must strengthen the technological innovation and the development of new products, strengthen the management and testing, eliminate the source of pollution, the current focus is to solve the problem of the substitution of compunds like alkylphenol polyoxyethylene and phthalate.