1. MOMENTUM CROQUET 2. ARC-COM EBB X This antimicrobial cubicle fabric is made of flame- retardant polyester with 3 percent X-Static yarn that has silver bonded to it. The fabric can be laundered at a maximum temperature of 160 degrees Fahrenheit, but without any fabric softeners or oxidative bleaching agents. 3. STINSONCOLOR BLOCK (CRISP) This fabric is made of 75 percent postconsumer recycled polyester and 25 percent solution dyed nylon. It has no antimicrobial or flame-retardant additives and is cleanable using water- or solvent- based or Crypton cleaners. Bleach solutions of up to 20 percent can be used for more difficult stains.
Courtesy Aileen Son
Check the label of any contract textile intended for health-care spaces and you’ll plunge into technical details—polyester, acrylic, or nylon, likely treated or chemically engineered to be flame retardant, antimicrobial, and cleanable with bleach or even harsher disinfectants. Then there are the coatings and finishes—one manufacturer lists no fewer than 18 options.
At NeoCon this year, addressing the annual meeting of the Association for Contract Textiles, association president Amanda Eaton, who is also the vice president of design at textile manufacturer Arc-Com, laid out the general problem of material transparency: “What our textiles are made of, where they are made, how they are made, and every chemical input down to the required parts per million—clients are requesting this information from distributors on a daily basis. Each entity has customized their specific wants, calling out different restricted chemicals, different threshold levels, and different reporting formats.” How did health-care textiles get so complicated?
Textiles are an easy scapegoat in hospitals. Curtains, furniture upholstery, bed linens, and even staff uniforms can be breeding grounds for infections. If there is a spill, textiles can stain and capture dirt; in the event of a fire, they can turn into kindling. Today we know that at least some of these fears may be unfounded, but in the 1960s and ’70s, news from U.S. hospitals seemed to bear them out. Textiles were implicated in major hospital res, and “one white paper found that 63 percent of the drapery hanging in the room was infected with both MRSA and Klebsiella pneumoniae,” recalls Je Layne, the founder of Arc-Com.
Manufacturers responded to the headlines. Starting in the 1970s, they shifted their focus to flame-retardant polyester or acrylic yarns like Rovana and Saran. In 1993 Crypton launched the first viable stain-resistant finish for fabrics, and many others followed suit. This millennium, a third wave of innovation took on anti- microbial treatments, yielding products like Crypton Green and Nanotex, as well as BioAm, MorCare, and Prefixx. There seemed to be no end to the performance requirements that textiles could handle. Then in 2012, Kaiser Permanente, one of the nation’s largest hospital systems, 11 other hospital systems, and three nonprofits joined forces to found the Healthier Hospitals Initiative (HHI), pledging to use safer chemicals in their interiors. Kaiser’s suspicions had been aroused by 2003 guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which urged hospitals to exercise caution in specifying antimicrobial- treated textile products because the EPA had not approved their “health claims asserting protection against human pathogens.” Meanwhile, studies emerged suggesting that many chemicals used in stain-resistant textile coatings or antimicrobial treatments—such as poly- or perfluorinated compounds, ionic silver, and zinc pyrithione—were either carcinogenic or likely to bio- accumulate to toxic levels in humans.