Michael Schuhmann: Archroma is committed to a growing portfolio of sustainable products, and moved its range of flame retardant products already in 2011 to PIN based flame retardants. This responds to today’s consumer demand for environmental ‘compliant’ products, and corresponds to qualification criteria defined by major ecolabels or Greenpeace’s ZDHC dashboard, as well as to producer and retailer specific restricted substance lists.
Archroma’s Pekoflam® PIN flame retardant range takes Oeko-Tex® as a guideline to define sustainability objectives. For example our Pekoflam HFC was the first powder based textile FRs to become Oeko-Tex®+ Standard 100 listed for skin contact accepted applications. Such listings validate environmental and consumer safety compliance, providing an important decision making tool for textile customers. But e.g. for common inorganic phosphate based PIN FRs, current Oeko-Tex criteria push to use purified phosphorus raw material sources, in order to meet defined heavy metal limits. Here a closer cooperation between industry and institutional bodies is needed to define suitable means in order to protect consumers while enabling processors to offer commercially and ecologically sustainable solutions.