This June more than 1,300 exhibitors, including kitchen and bath manufacturers and suppliers, from around the world gathered at the Shanghai New International Expo Center in the Pudong New Area, to showcase their newest kitchen and bathroom products during Kitchen & Bath China 2023. Key trends seen at the show were smart homes, sustainable product design, and lead-free water contact components.
Smart homes are becoming more advanced, enabling consumers to improve comfort and energy efficiency. The kitchen and bathroom play a central role in smart homes, and water contact material choices become challenging because manufacturers in the kitchen and bath industry need to stay up to date with changing regulations, supply chain globalization challenges and high consumer expectation.
Although brass is popular for valves and hydraulic components found in plumbing, boiler and heater components—which are connected to smart home energy management systems—the material often faces scrutiny because of an increase in costs due to tighter lead leaching regulations. Many stringent material regulations are now in place for plumbing parts, including components for water heaters, heat pumps and boilers, to protect the public from lead in drinking water.
As a manufacturer, you can look to low-leaching, high-performance thermoplastics as a lead-free material solution. We offer a range of proven water heater thermoplastic solutions—our EcoPaXX®, ForTii® and XytronTM solutions are free from potentially harmful leachable substances and comply with drinking water contact regulations observed worldwide, including NSF 61 and KTW-BWGL. Each material minimizes the risk of premature part wear in demanding hydrolytic conditions and simplifies material change programs by cost-effectively replacing lower strength thermoplastics in existing production processes.
Plus, our new EcoPaXX Q-DWX12 grade is our bio-based, high-performance polyamide (PA410) that offers outstanding performance across the board, while being made mainly from tropical castor beans, which don’t compete with the food chain. The grade is certified for warm water applications are ideal for replacing PPO and PA66. The material often outperforms alternative low Tg PPA in reliability due to its superior dimensional stability, improved hydrolytic stability and slow crystallization speeds that enhance sealing and bonding properties.
Manufacturers have used ForTii, Xytron and EcoPaXX as drop-in solutions for PA66, PPA, PPO and PPS alternatives. All three solutions demonstrate high flow and easy processing behaviour, which enables suppliers to cost-effectively produce complex or thin-walled parts without compromising performance.
Envalior, formerly DSM Engineering Materials and Lanxess HPM, is a global leader in material solutions, developed to meet a wide variety of challenges the water, food and appliances industries. Envalior offers a robust portfolio of materials built to support next-generation technologies across a broad range of global industries. Our solutions are backed by extensive research, testing and collaboration with OEMs and tier suppliers, to deliver on all your safety, reliability and design flexibility needs.
Market Development Manager at Envalior
After obtaining his Ph.D. in supramolecular and organic chemistry, Pim Janssen began his career at Envalior as a chemist for the engineering plastics Akulon (PA6) and the biobased EcoPaXX (PA410). He also spent a few years in product development and program management for high temperature polyamides ForTii (PPA), Stanyl (PA46), EcoPaXX (PA410) and Xytron (PPS). In 2018, he joined the business management team as market development manager for water and food contact, industrial applications, and to develop a unreinforced PPA portfolio.
