Skip to content
Heavy Metal Index

Field-portable XRF analysis reveals the ubiquity of antimony in plastic consumer products

Turner and Filella screened plastic consumer items with field-portable X-ray fluorescence and summarised total antimony by use category.

Turner and Filella screened plastic consumer items with field-portable X-ray fluorescence and summarised total antimony by use category. The highest mean was in electronics. The food-and-drink category is a plastic-article category, not a measurement of antimony that had migrated into a beverage. No brand names are repeated here.

Key numbers

Table 4 reports Sb in µg/g for items in which antimony was quantified. The first four printed columns are count bins whose headers lost their superscripts in the text layer (b102, 102–103, 103–104, N104). Those bins are counts of items, not concentrations, and they are not copied as concentrations. Mean, median, minimum, and maximum are:

CategoryMeanMedianMinMax
Electronics12,30026208058,900
Food-drink410369179893
Clothing-upholstery1570317909922
Cleaning-storage355342229495
Construction-plumbing156040710313,000
Toys-hobbies1490571729190
Office-stationery8553191192720
Leisure-sport7754941222470
Vehicle interiors1710975616020
Total47105596158,900

A separate inventory table prints 818 items in the total row. That count is not the same object as the concentration summary.

Methods (brief)

Portable XRF in plastics mode. The result is total antimony in the solid plastic. Migration into food, drink, or saliva was not measured. LOD discussion in the paper is method context and is not restated as a sample result.

Evidence fitness

The table supports category-level total antimony in mixed plastic goods. It does not support a food-contact migration limit or a single product page.

Limitations

Bin headers in the text layer dropped the powers of ten. They are flagged and are not treated as µg/g. The food-drink mean of 410 µg/g is the plastic, not the drink. Named commercial items in the discussion are omitted.

Update history

No substantive edit history is available in this build. The full commit record is available in git.