Sorption of semi-volatile organic compounds to clothing textiles

Clothing can act as a barrier and a source of skin exposure to chemicals due to reversible accumulation on and within textile fibers. The partition coefficient quantifies the equilibrium relationship between textile and air for a specific chemical and is a key parameter in models estimating dermal exposure. Here, textiles composed of natural and/or synthetic fibers were exposed for 26 days in environmental test chambers under different climatic conditions to semi-volatile organic compounds (SVOCs) that have similar, but not identical, physical and chemical properties. The nine textiles tested included a single fiber type or blends of cotton, polyester, nylon, linen and/or elastane. The seven SVOCs are found commonly indoors and in consumer products: 4-t-octylphenol (4t-OP),4-nonylphenol (4-NP); di-n-butyl adipate (DnBA); galaxolide (HHCB); di-n-butyl phthalate (DnBP); benzophenone-3 (BP-3) and 3-(4'-methylbenzylidene)camphor (4-MBC). The chamber air concentrations and masses accumulated on textiles were measured and the mass based (K_m, m³/g), area based (K_a, m) and volume based (K_v, dimensionless) partition coefficients were calculated. Partition coefficients among all chemicals were generally lower for polyester and higher for cotton and blends. A hierarchical cluster analysis combined with fiber specific matrix analysis showed that, across the SVOCs tested, the partition coefficients for nylon/elastane were ~ 7 to 70 times higher than for jeans cotton, while the partition coefficient for jeans cotton were ~ 2 to 7 time higher than for polyester. K_m, K_a and K_v were lowest for HHCB and highest for 4-NP, DnBP and 4-MBC. However, chemical-textile partition coefficients were not statistically correlated with respect to physical and environmental properties of the SVOCs. The values were statistically the same for different chamber air concentrations of the chemicals tested, and from 24 °C to 33 °C there was only a weak reduction in the partition coefficients.