Bio-sourced and renewable flame retardant treatments for textiles:where we are and where we are going

Despite the successful attempts carried out so far, providing flame retardance to fabrics is still a challenging issue. Indeed, the irregularity of the textiles’ surface, as well as their limited thickness, among other factors, make it quite difficult to provide adequate resistance to a propagating flame or an irradiative heat flux. Thus, surface engineering has become one of the most reliable and effective strategies for conferring flame retardant properties to such peculiar materials. Undoubtedly, the textile surface is the critical zone during combustion scenarios: being the interface between gas and condensed phase, it controls mass and heat transfers, which are the processes responsible for flame fueling. The research carried out on this topic during the last 10 to 15 years has highlighted the possibility of successfully exploiting renewable and bio-sourced flame retardants through surface engineering methods: in this context, biomacromolecules(such as proteins and ribonucleic acids) and organic extracts have shown very good potential in conferring flame retardance to different types of fabrics. This talk will summarize the main outcomes achieved so far, pointing out the current drawbacks of the use of renewable and bio-sourced products, and trying to figure out some possible solutions to overcome these limitations.