What are surfactants and how do they affect the environment?

2024 Author: Howard Calhoun | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 10:16

Water is the most common universal solvent on our planet. Sooner or later, any substance that comes into contact with it undergoes a hydrolysis reaction and decomposes.

However, in some cases, this process should be accelerated, not waiting for it to pass at a natural speed. Surfactants are used for this.

What is a surfactant? These are chemical compounds that increase the fluidity of water and improve its ability to wet various physical bodies. The effectiveness of this process is hindered by surface tension - a thin film consisting of liquid molecules that separates it from the surrounding gaseous medium. This layer is quite strong, it creates a barrier for the penetration of water into those objects that need to be saturated with molecules for some reason.

The main reason why people tend to wet various objects is the desire to clean them of dirt, that is, to wash or wash. Soap is the main and oldest surfactant with which mankind solves this problem, but the achievements of modern chemistry have shown that such a surfactant is no longer the most effective tool. Despite the hugethe amount of soap produced and consumed, for laundry and dishwashing it is rarely used today. Since the late 40s of the XX century, new detergents have appeared that have a truly miraculous power to break surface tension.

Classification of surfactants according to their chemical composition, molecular structure and nature of the impact includes:

- Non-ionic surfactants.

- Amphoteric surfactants.

- Cationic surfactants.

- Anionic surfactants.

For all their practical and economic usefulness, surface-active substances produced by the modern chemical industry in truly titanic volumes pose a certain threat to the planet's ecology. Although there is a substance that breaks down into carbohydrates after use. It can be said that a surfactant based on alkyl polyglucosides is safe for the environment.

The main share of the produced detergents and washing powders are resistant to decomposition and retain their properties for a long period. Getting into water bodies and the oceans, they can eventually affect the properties of the main fluid of our planet so much that it becomes life-threatening. Already today (due to the abundance of used detergents) hard-to-remove particles of heavy metals get into the water, including drinking water, from the soil, which have a detrimental effect on the body. These harmful inclusions would not be able to dissolve so actively in water, penetrating into it from the soil, if surfactants were not present in it.in dangerous concentrations.

It would seem, what is the problem? The production of all detergents, except those based on safe alkyl polyglucosides, should simply be banned. But not everything is so simple. The fact is that such a surfactant is too expensive, and detergents containing it are far from affordable for everyone. Manufacturers and consumers rarely think about the fact that the consequences of thoughtless chemicalization can be catastrophic.