Hmm, this is interesting.
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Originally Posted by ashamutt |  | | | | | | | | | Here are 2 articles that made me aware of this..... | |  | |  | |
Neither of those are articles, both are blog posts, both are anecdotal, and neither understand what's going on.
From those and the message boards linked to it's clear there's a potential problem and that it's worth investigating.
I just wouldn't trust any of their conclusions.
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Originally Posted by ashamutt | | | | | | | | | | (will water based inks cause this as well?) | | | | | | |
That depends on what is causing the problem.
The three things being blamed are PVC, phthalates, and formaldehyde (all three are known to cause health problems).
Plastisol is a PVC based ink. Waterbased ink does not contain PVC. So if PVC is the problem, those two are pretty clear.
Some ink (waterbased and plastisol) contains phthalates. They're known to be harmful so modern inks aim to minimise them. There are many phthalate free inks on the market, but not all are.
Formaldehyde was widely used in discharge ink (waterbased and plastisol). Again, newer formulations of ink don't use it, but there are still products on the market that do.
So there are inks that contain some of the above (even all three in one ink is possible) and some that don't contain any. It depends on the ink you're using.
However, the reason the blog posts, forum posts etc. mention those specific compounds is probably just because they're the ones they've heard about in media scare stories, and therefore know to look for. It's possible the allergic reaction is being caused by a different chemical - it was never diagnosed by a dermatologist.
The blog quoted someone as saying
"residual phthalate from not fully fused ink is what is most likely causing the reaction", which is a reasonable guess. If so, that's not a problem with the ink, that's a problem with the printer incorrectly curing the ink.
Before I drew any conclusions I'd want to know a
lot more about how the garments were printed though. A lot of the consumers are assuming screenprinting, but consumers assume a lot of things.
I've often speculated about how most tagless prints are done, because they don't look like regular screenprints. It's possible (and this is pure speculation) that they're printed via a different process (for example, pad printing), that because that process has different end requirements (cheap is more important than quality) it has different results more prone to leaving residue.
I really don't know - but if the problem was just that screenprinting causes contact allergies in infants, I'd have expected problems to arise before now. Some ink bleeds through the garment to the inside, and some infants would have extensive contact with the outside of their clothing.
It's possible that the level of contact from a tag is just
that much higher, but my first suspicion would be that we're looking at a new trend (tagless prints) that uses a new printing method. Why are they done now and weren't before? There was demand before, which implies there has been some technological change that makes them now more cost effective. It's not just a design trend, it's a manufacturing trend. When there's a new problem, it makes sense that the first thing you'd check is the new variable - that's not merely
printing (that's not new) it's the
method of printing.
In other words, it's highly likely that there are dangerous methods of tagless printing, and safe methods of tagless printing.
Someone at the manufacturing end should have done more testing and eliminated the dangerous ones before they were ever used on infants' clothing.
Tagless Clothes cause Chemical Burns ????? 
