Plastic antimicrobial agent is a kind of bacteria, fungus, mold, algae and virus on the surface of plastic have inhibition or kill the additive of action, its can inhibit the growth of these microorganism and reproduction, achieve the purpose of bacteriostasis, antimicrobial thereby. Plastic antimicrobial agents are usually divided into inorganic, organic, natural and polymer antimicrobial agents and other four categories. Shanghai Ecolin Technology Co., Ltd. as a professional antimicrobial agent manufacturers, let's introduce these four antimicrobial agents.

Inorganic silver antibacterial agent

Among many metal ions, mercury, silver, cadmium, copper and zinc all have strong antibacterial ability, but when used, they are safe and non-toxic to silver, zinc and copper ions, and the antibacterial ability of silver ions is far stronger than that of other metal ions such as zinc and copper. Therefore, inorganic silver antibacterial agents occupy the dominant position of inorganic antibacterial agents.

Inorganic silver antibacterial agents have the advantages of high antibacterial activity, good safety (less toxicity, no irritation, no carcinogenicity, no deformity, etc.), good heat resistance, etc.

However, the free silver ions from the inorganic silver antibacterial agents are easily reduced to elemental silver in gray or brown after being heated to a certain temperature under sunlight, which affects the color of the products and seriously affects the transparency of the products, and has poor inhibition effect on fungi and mold.

According to different carriers, different kinds of inorganic silver antibacterial agents have been developed, such as zeolite silver, activated carbon silver, copper phosphate silver, calcium phosphate silver, silica gel silver, zirconium phosphate silver, hydroxyapatite silver, glass silver and so on.

Organic antibacterial agents are mainly quaternary ammonium salts, guanidine, alcohols, chlorine-containing hydrochloric acid, (iso) thiazoles, organic halides, organic metal compounds, phenols, pyridines, imidazoles halogenated alkyl, iodide and other components of the antibacterial agents.

The main varieties of organic antibacterial agents are: ammonium salts, phenolic ethers, phenols, guanidine, isothiazole, pyrrole, organic metals, imidazole, pyridine, thiazole and so on.

Organic antibacterial agents have the advantages of fast sterilization speed, strong sterilization ability, non-toxic, convenient processing, good color stability and so on. But its heat resistance is poor (plastic processing temperature is easy to decompose failure, and decomposition products may cause secondary pollution), easy to precipitate in the solvent environment, easy to produce drug resistance, decomposition products toxic, safety is not as good as inorganic antimicrobial agents.

Natural antimicrobial agent is mainly refined from natural plants or animals. It is mainly composed of mustard, castor oil, horseradish, japinol, mugwort, aloe, chitosan, chitin and other substances with antibacterial activity, which can be applied to disposable plastic products such as food packaging bags. Natural antimicrobial agents are safe and non-toxic, but they have some defects such as limited antimicrobial effect, poor heat resistance, low bactericide rate and difficult processing.

Polymer antimicrobial agent itself can be used as antimicrobial polymer materials, can also be used as an antimicrobial agent to join other plastics. It is obtained by introducing antibacterial functional groups. According to different functional groups, it can be divided into quaternary ammonium salt type, quaternary phosphine salt type, guanidine salt type, pyridine type and organometallic copolymer, etc. Antibacterial functional groups can be introduced by homopolymerization or copolymerization of monomers with functional groups, and can also be introduced by grafting.

Polymer antibacterial agents have the advantages of low toxicity, high bactericidal efficiency, long bactericidal timeliness, and good heat resistance and solvent resistance, which is a new development direction of antibacterial agents.