Why the Baby-Wipes Standard Adds Antimony

Abstract

Version 2 of the Heavy Metal Tested and Certified standard for baby wipes adds antimony to the panel and holds it below 30 mg/kg, entered as 30000 µg/kg, on the total content of the finished product. The number is not one HMTc originated. It is the antimony floor in the EU Ecolabel for absorbent hygiene products, Commission Decision (EU) 2023/1809, Annex I criterion 7.3.8, which requires antimony to be present in the final product at less than 30 mg/kg ^[1]. That Ecolabel is voluntary, and the cell says so plainly rather than dressing a voluntary floor as a mandate. Because the criterion is written on total content in the final product, the limit is measured directly on a wipe, and the cell is included in pass/fail. One government figure sits close enough to invite confusion, and it is kept separate on purpose: Korea's MFDS Notice No. 2026-23, revised 24 March 2026 and first enacted as Notice No. 2018-19 on 21 March 2018, sets antimony for children's disposable diapers at 60 mg/kg or less by migration, applied separately to the inner lining and the waterproof layer ^[2]. Migration and total content are not the same measurement, so the Korea diaper figure is precedent that antimony belongs on a baby-product panel rather than the baby-wipes number itself.

Version 2 adds antimony and changes nothing else about how the standard is published. No products had been certified under version 1.0. The version-1.0 DOI stays live as the previous version, 10.83138/hmtc.std.2.baby-wipes, dated 2026-08-17 ^[3], and version 2 deposits no new DOI. Every other analyte cell keeps the basis it already carried. An evidence note dated 2 October 2026 brings the literature current with the Heavy Metal Index syntheses on baby wipes and on antimony in baby products, rebuilt after the 26 September 2026 ingest. That note does not change the ceiling. What follows sets out what version 2 changes, where the number comes from, the evidence it answers to, and what the mark does and does not claim.

What version 2 sets, and what it leaves alone

Version 2 adds antimony and does nothing to the version-1.0 DOI. No products had been certified under version 1.0, so nothing certified is disturbed. That DOI is the previous version, not a withdrawn one, and it stays resolvable at https://doi.org/10.83138/hmtc.std.2.baby-wipes ^[3]. DataCite records it as version 1.0, publication year 2026, registered 19 September 2026, with no separate print date and no volume or pages, and the house version history dates edition 1.0 to 2026-08-17. Version 2 does not replace that DOI with a new one, and it deposits none of its own. The current text of the standard is the baby wipes standard, where the antimony cell reads 30000 µg/kg, is included in pass/fail alongside the other analytes, and carries its source comparator, strictly less than 30 mg/kg, in the cell provenance.

Where the number comes from

The design rule is the one the rest of the program follows: adopt the applicable government figure on the product’s own basis, and invent nothing. For antimony in a wipe, the figure written on total content in the final product of an absorbent hygiene product is the EU Ecolabel one, so the cell is entered at 30000 µg/kg and included in pass/fail. Numerically lower impurity figures exist for cosmetics in general. They are not this cell, for the reasons in the table.

Commission Decision (EU) 2023/1809 is the EU Ecolabel for absorbent hygiene products, and its Annex I criterion 7.3.8 governs impurities in the final product: the listed chemicals shall not be present in the final product at a concentration higher than Table 9, where antimony is set at < 30 mg/kg ^[1]. The instrument text is unchanged. Table 9 is content in the final product, not migration. The Ecolabel is voluntary, and the cell discloses that rather than implying a mandate. It is the government floor for this analyte. Because the decision’s own assessment accepts analysis of the final product, the limit is measured directly on a wipe. Thirty mg/kg is 30000 µg/kg, the source comparator is strictly less than 30 mg/kg, and because the compiled record carries no comparator field, that inequality is written into the cell provenance so nothing is lost.

The antimony cell sits on a different basis from the analytes already published, and that is deliberate. Those cells are written on the total content of the impregnating cosmetic liquid, in µg/kg of that liquid as sold; the antimony cell is written on total content in the finished product, because that is the basis the EU criterion uses and the one that can be checked directly on a wipe.

The one government figure that has to be held apart is Korea’s. MFDS Notice No. 2026-23 sets antimony for children’s disposable diapers at 60 mg/kg or less by migration, applied separately to the inner lining and the waterproof layer ^[2]. That is a migration test, where this ceiling is a total-content test, and the two measure different quantities. The Korea figure is real precedent that a government limits antimony in a baby product; it is not, and is not used as, the baby-wipes number.

The evidence the number answers to

The ceiling is the EU Ecolabel figure, 30000 µg/kg. Everything in this section is the evidence that put antimony on the panel in the first place, and none of it is the ceiling. These measurements establish that antimony occurs in baby-wipe materials; they are not used to set the limit.

Washington State Department of Ecology Publication 14-04-014, revised June 2021, measured total elemental antimony in baby-wipe components and in moist baby-wipes packaging ^[5]. Components were prioritised by X-ray fluorescence and confirmed by ICP-MS, so the design is an upper-tail screen of products bought for that study rather than a random sample of the category. Across that screen, antimony was detected in 57 percent of 150 children’s-product components. The report’s frame of reference is the Washington Children’s Safe Products Act threshold of 100 ppm, which is a manufacturer reporting trigger, not a health-based maximum and not this ceiling. The analyte is total elemental antimony, and the report does not speciate Sb(III) from Sb(V). The same three wipe rows print lead at 0.4, 0.8, and 1.4 ppm and total chromium at 0.5 to 0.6 ppm. Those prints are not scored against the lead or chromium cells here: the preparation is a screened component, and the report does not say the component was the whole wipe. One breast-wipes package is a separate article, at 38.0 ppm antimony, and it is not a baby-wipe sheet. These are occurrence figures, and occurrence does not set a certification cell.

Choi, Song, and Kim 2016 digested approximately 0.2 g and diluted with 25 mL of water, not made up to 25 mL ^[6]. Table 5 prints an antimony range for wet-wipe nonwovens but neither sheet figure in mg/kg, and the conversion to a sheet estimate is uncertain because the methods do not state a made-up final volume. Treating the final volume as 25 mL gives µg/L × 0.125, from mg/kg ≈ (µg/L × 0.025 L / 0.0002 kg) / 1,000, or about 23.48 to 2,444.79 mg/kg; the division by 1,000 is required because the quotient of those inputs is micrograms per kilogram. Treating the digest as 8 mL of acid plus 25 mL of water gives µg/L × 0.165, and a higher top of about 3,227.13 mg/kg. The paper prints neither figure, and neither reading is the certification ceiling. The authors’ attribution of the result to an antimony trioxide or antimony glycolate catalyst is their inference, and it does not hold cleanly for wipes: the highest sheet in Table 5 is labelled rayon only, and several polyester-labelled sheets were not detected, so the polyester-catalyst explanation is a hypothesis here rather than a finding.

The China Association for Quality Promotion of Consumer Products Safety page dated 2 April 2026 reports a detection count for total antimony in online baby wipes ^[7]. The sample-by-sample annex is an image. Preferred reads of total antimony, taken as micrograms per liter, are numeric in 20 of 21 columns. The stable low read is 15.02 µg/L and the stable high preferred read is 450.45 µg/L. A second full-cell pass of the same image also produced 490.40 µg/L where the preferred read is 450.45, and 399.43 µg/L where the preferred read is 355.43. This briefing keeps the preferred range and does not adopt the second pass. The preparation that produced the per-liter figure is not described, so the unit is not a sheet concentration in milligrams per kilogram, and it is not a candidate limit. Brands named on that page are not repeated here.

Göçer’s 2025 master’s thesis is the dataset that separates the three objects in a wipe: the liquid squeezed from the sheet, the digested fiber, and the digested packaging ^[12]. Solution antimony in one coded product is 695.40 ppb, which the English abstract rounds to 695.4 ppb. Fiber antimony is printed as 565.46 ppb and 537.86 ppb, and a further sentence and section 4.1 print 476.69 ppb. All three fiber figures are in the thesis, and 476.69 is lower than the other two. Packaging antimony is printed at 0.03 and 0.04 ppb, at or below the quantification limit of 0.10 ppb. Those antimony results of several hundred ppb sit above the stated calibration top of 50 ppb. The methods digested an approximate 0.2 g and then added 10 mL of water, and they do not print a made-up final volume, so no sheet concentration is calculated. Product codes are kept. Brand names are not repeated. This split shows that lotion, fiber, and packaging are different measurements. It is not a candidate limit.

The Heavy Metal Index syntheses that carry this record are the baby-wipes synthesis and the antimony-in-baby-products synthesis ^[16][17]. Both state the same boundary this briefing uses. A concentration in a wipe is not a dose, because a ppm in a sheet is not a microgram on the skin and a microgram on the skin is not a microgram absorbed. Neither synthesis ranks products, and neither sets a certification number. The ceiling on this side remains Table 9.

Biver, Turner, and Filella 2021 measured artificial-sweat release from polyester textiles, not from wipes ^[8]. The extract row is a simulant result under ISO 105-E04, which is neither absorption nor a wipe-sheet total.

What the standard does not claim

The mark on a baby wipe certifies heavy-metal safety, and antimony is now part of what that means: the finished product was tested and its total antimony fell below the EU Ecolabel floor of 30 mg/kg. It is not a claim that a wipe contains no antimony, and no analytical method can certify the absence of an element. It is not a claim built on the occurrence figures above either; those establish that antimony occurs in these materials, and the ceiling comes from a government limit rather than from the spread of the measurements. A concentration in a component, a digest, an annex, or a separated lotion or fiber is not a dose to an infant ^[16][17]. The evidence is read here as harm reduction rather than alarm: antimony is measurably present in wipe materials, the sovereign floor is a defensible place to hold it, and a caregiver is entitled to a product whose antimony content was actually checked against that floor. The certification decision is made on this side of the program; the Heavy Metal Index remains the literature base, cited one way, and does not set this ceiling ^[4]. This briefing names no brand and ranks no product.

Common questions

References

Works cited in this briefing’s text, in first-appearance order. This is not the full evidence base for the underlying standard; it is only what the prose above draws on. Every range in the briefing is a model built on one of these published anchors. Where a work carries a DOI or a public URL, its title and domain link to it; primary legal documents and published standards are named but not linked to a corpus record.

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