What, non-woven fabric is not cloth?

Eco-bags are also made of plastic?

Wet wipes discarded outdoors can't degrade like napkins?

Do you really understand the common non-woven fabrics and products in your life?

Non-woven fabrics in life

Non-woven fabric is a common material in our lives and is widely used in various life products. According to the application requirements, non-woven fabrics can be divided into two categories: durable and disposable. Durable non-woven fabrics can be used many times and have a certain service life. They are widely used in clothing, home improvement, agriculture, industry and other fields. For example, in recent years, many of the most popular environmental protection bags are made of non-woven fabrics.

Fashion environmental protection bag made of non-woven fabric map | Taobao

Disposable application-oriented non-woven fabrics are also very common, cleaning wipes, masks for everyone during the epidemic, tea bags, baby diapers...

Wet wipes: the main raw materials include non-woven fabrics

Is non-woven cloth?

Non-woven fabric, standard name is non-woven fabric. China's national standard GB/T 5709-1997 "Textile Nonwovens Terminology" defines nonwovens as: "oriented or randomly arranged fibers, sheets, webs or batts made by rubbing, clasping, or bonding, or a combination of these methods, excluding paper, woven fabrics, knitted fabrics, tufted felt fabrics and wet-felted products. The fibers used may be natural or chemical fibers; they may be staple fibers, filaments or fibers formed in situ." [1]

Among them, the word "cloth" may make people think that its raw materials are natural materials, but in fact, the three major fibers used to produce non-woven fabrics are polypropylene (63% of the total), polyester (23% of the total) and viscose (8% of the total), the remaining 2% are acrylic fibers, 1.5 are polyamide and 2.5 are other fibers [2].

Among them, viscose fiber is the processing of natural fibers, and polyester, polypropylene, acrylic and polyamide fibers are chemical fibers, but also the main polymer components of synthetic plastics. Non-woven fabrics made of these chemical fibers are plastic products. It can be seen that the vast majority (89.5 percent) of non-woven fabrics on the market are refractory plastic products.

Pendulum small knowledge

Polypropylene: referred to as PP, a semi-crystalline thermoplastic, one of the common polymer materials, commonly used in textiles, stationery, plastic parts production.

Polyester: commonly known as "polyester", is made of organic dibasic acid and dihydric alcohol polycondensation of polyester by the spinning of synthetic fibers, referred to as PET, belonging to high molecular compounds.

Propionamide: Acrylamide is usually used as a synthetic polyacrylamide, this aggregate can be used as a water-soluble thickener for sewage treatment, papermaking, ore treatment, cloth non-iron treatment, etc.

Polyamide: one of the polymer materials, referred to as PA, can be natural synthesis and artificial synthesis, common in textiles, carpets, sportswear and so on.

Viscose fiber: referred to as viscose fiber, also known as viscose silk, its main raw material is chemical pulp, including cotton pulp and wood pulp, through the chemical reaction of natural cellulose separated from regeneration.

Look at the life of non-woven fabrics from the whole life cycle of wet wipes products: Is it really environmentally friendly?

On the Internet, some people say that non-woven fabrics are "easy to decompose, non-toxic, non-irritating, recyclable, and do not pollute the environment", and are "a new generation of environmentally friendly materials" and "environmentally friendly products that protect the earth's ecology?

We take the representative product wet wipes of non-woven fabrics as an example, and objectively analyze this from the perspective of the entire product life cycle: raw material acquisition, processing, manufacturing, sales, use and waste disposal.

The non-woven fabrics used to make wet wipes are mostly polyester fibers [3], and polyester fibers, as synthetic fossil-based fibers, are processed from non-renewable fossil raw materials such as oil, natural gas or coal, as are other plastic family members. Fossil raw materials after a series of processing to obtain polyester melt, melt spinning to obtain polyester fiber [4].

Nearly 70 million barrels of oil are used worldwide to make polyester every year, [5] and it takes more than twice as much energy to produce polyester as to produce cotton. In addition, the production of polyester requires the use of harmful chemicals, including carcinogens, and since most polyesters are produced in countries with lax environmental regulations such as China and Indonesia, the discharge of production waste may have more environmental impact [6].

Unlike textile materials, non-woven fabrics do not require knitting or yarn, but the fibers are directly bonded together by physical or chemical methods [7]. Common non-woven fabric processing technology has spunlace, thermal legal, spunbond, melt blown method and so on. At present, the wet wipes on the market are mainly spunlace non-woven fabrics [8], that is, the fiber raw materials are processed into non-woven fabrics through the spunlace process.

Spunlace non-woven wipes have the advantages of softness, not easy to fall off, but in the production process, its high power consumption, water consumption, steam consumption, industrial energy consumption is very high [9].

Pendulum small knowledge

Spunlace non-woven fabric: high-pressure fine water jet onto one or more layers of fiber mesh, so that the fiber mesh reinforcement and mutual entanglement.

Heat-sealing non-woven fabric: adding fibrous or powdery hot-melt adhesive reinforcement material into the fiber web, and then the fiber web is formed by heating, melting, cooling and reinforcement.

Spunbond non-woven fabric: After the polymer has been extruded and stretched to form continuous filaments, the filaments are laid into a web, and the web is then bonded to itself, thermally bonded, chemically bonded or mechanically strengthened to make the web into a non-woven fabric.

Meltblown non-woven fabric: a high-speed hot air stream is used to draw the polymer melt stream extruded from the die nozzle hole, thereby forming ultra-fine fibers and collecting them on the curtain or drum, while bonding themselves.

In recent years, the wet wipes market has continued to develop rapidly. By 2017, the number of registered wet wipes manufacturers has reached 739. The types and uses of wet wipes continue to expand, but the base material of wet wipes is still mainly spunlace non-woven fabrics, and there are few enterprises producing natural fiber wipes such as cotton fiber and bamboo fiber [10][11].

Wet wipes as a disposable cleaning and sanitary products, "after use" in the use of convenience at the same time also increased the consumption of resources, to bring us more garbage.

Although plastic products can be recycled, the used wet wipes have been contaminated and cannot be recycled. Waste wet wipes belong to dry garbage in garbage classification, and the disposal of dry garbage is usually landfill and incineration. The landfill leachate produced by plastic waste will pollute the soil and water; and in another way of waste disposal-waste incineration, non-woven fabrics made of plastic will also produce carcinogens dioxin, Acid gas and other pollution [12].

Landfill is prone to rupture of impervious layer even if impervious treatment is carried out

In general, whether it is landfill or incineration, non-woven wet wipes as a plastic waste has a certain degree of ecological toxicity.

Due to its stable chemical properties, non-woven fabrics made of plastic are difficult to degrade in the natural environment. Some consumers abandon the wet wipes in the natural environment because of weak environmental awareness and cognitive deviation from the real non-woven materials (think non-woven degradable). These non-woven wipes remaining in the natural environment may take 100 years to degrade [13]. At the same time, they may be eaten by animals, causing illness or death of animals, and threatening the safety of animals. In the process of degradation, polyester non-woven wipes may become secondary microplastics under the action of wind and sun, a more difficult plastic pollutant, which poses a huge threat to the entire ecological chain.

To sum up, a piece of polyester non-woven wipes from the cradle to the grave, will cause many negative effects on the ecology.

In the mining and processing of raw materials, it will consume non-renewable fossil energy and cause possible waste discharge pollution;

In the manufacture of wet wipes, a lot of energy will be consumed, including a large amount of water;

In sales and use, because of its one-time use characteristics, will increase the generation of garbage;

In terms of waste treatment, firstly, it is difficult to recycle due to its product characteristics; secondly, in the process of landfill and incineration, it will cause soil, water and air pollution;

For waste non-woven wipes that are out of control and flow into the natural environment, they are difficult to degrade naturally, and they will cause harm to animals and even the entire ecosystem.

Of course, we also need to see the advantages of non-woven fabrics. Its invention reduces costs, improves production efficiency, and brings many conveniences to our lives. With the development of non-woven technology and waste treatment technology, the harm caused by non-woven fabrics to the environment is gradually decreasing.

Here, we do not judge the pros and cons of non-woven fabrics, but only explain their possible environmental impact. In addition, this paper only makes a simple analysis of the impact of non-woven fabrics on the environment, if you want to get more rigorous and quantitative results, you need to use the life cycle assessment method (Life Cycle Assessment) for systematic assessment.