Karen Janssens, Campine, presented antimony trioxide (ATO) as a flame retardant synergist and demonstrated that for many applications, halogen-antimony systems are still of the highest efficiency.
Although China dominates world mining and smelting of antimony and production of ATO, this is changing with China’s share of antimony mineral mining falling from 90% in 2010 to 74% today. Antimony is suspected toxic by inhalation (class 2 cancer classification IARC) so safe processing forms must be supplied, e.g. by whetting or as a highly filled masterbatch.. Campine also presented tests of ATO as a synergist with a PIN intumescent FR in thermoplastics, showing lower smoke emission and effective fire performance (lower heat release rate, UL94-V0 at 1.6mm).