With the growing global population, the demand for safe food and drinking water is expected to show a substantial increase in the coming decades. Many countries will be affected by water scarcity and limited supply of clean water. At the same time, health and safety measures and environmental regulations as well as increasingly stringent legislation can be expected to increase the market demand for suitable engineered plastics materials.

For health and safety reasons, products intended to come into contact with drinking water must be certified in the countries where they are sold. Each region has different regulations, but testing practices usually involve the screening of the raw material constituents of the plastics formulation and evaluation of any possible impairment of the drinking water by chemical substances or microbial contamination.

Such evaluations tend to be labour-intensive, they may take up to 6 months and depend on good communication throughout the whole supply chain; in particular cases factory audits may also be involved.

Since 2011, four EU Member States – France, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom Great Britain (4MS) – have been expending effort to adopt common, or directly comparable, practices for the acceptance of the constituents used in materials in contact with drinking water, the testing of materials, the use of common test methods and setting acceptance levels, the specification of tests to be applied to products, reviewing factory production control, setting audit testing requirements and assessment of the capabilities of certification and testing bodies.

Using the expertise gained from developing clean materials for food contact and medical applications, in the past few years we have invested much effort in the development of suitable grades for drinking water contact applications. Newly developed grades include polystyrene materials for water meter components, glass and carbon fibre-reinforced speciality polyamide and PPS (polyphenylene sulphide) grades substituting brass metal.

Please contact our engineers to solve your need for drinking water contact compounds.