Under the US Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, all materials which allow more than the specified limits of the defined hazardous components to be extracted, when tested by the 'toxic characteristic leaching procedure' ("TCLP"), must be disposed of as toxic waste.

For cadmium pigments, the relevant components and limits are as follows:

CADMIUM - 1.0 ppm Cd
SELENIUM - 1.0 ppm Se
BARIUM - 100 ppm Ba

Some time ago, JMB greatly improved its procedures in order to achieve compliance with the 0.01 % limit on acid-soluble cadmium laid down by the Council of Europe for pigments for use in food-contact plastics. All JMB cadmium pigments comply with the Council of Europe limit with a wide margin of safety : a normal result would be < 0.001 % Cd.

Achieving such low levels of acid-soluble cadmium also allows JMB cadmium pigments to comply with the TCLP limits detailed above. Because of the simple and known make-up of these pigments, a simplified TCLP leaching test can be used, but this is still too slow to be used for production purposes. For this reason, all production batches are tested for compliance with Council of Europe limits, with random batches also being tested for TCLP. No failures have been reported to date.

Please feel free to contact us for further information and advice on this subject.

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