Mineral Flame Retardants - Overview And Future Trends

In our daily life we are surrounded more and more by non-flame retarded plastics. So, fires frequently occur all over the world each day. They kill people and cause huge monetary losses for the economy. Obviously, even more serious are fire deaths. Despite extensive fire precaution regulations for buildings, transportation, electrical engineering etc. there were still around 1000 fire deaths in Germany and about 5000 in the USA/year at the beginning of the 1990s. All these figures illustrate how important efficient fire protection is. Mineral flame retardants for plastics play an important role in this issue. This article reviews these materials, their functions and future outlook.