ATR-FTIR investigation of plastics in cosmetics, personal-care products and biodegradable materials

Abstract

This paper presents the relevance of ATR-FTIR technique in the investigation of the presence of synthetic plastics in selected beauty and consumer goods. In the first step, we performed a vibrational analysis of different types of synthetic plastic consumer goods, i.e. PET, PP, PS, PE, HDPE and LDPE. Thus, we identified the vibrational assignments of each IR absorption band, as well as the quality of the plastic consumer goods samples. Secondly, we investigated from point of view of the presence of plastics, some personal care products and cosmetics, i.e, a lipstick, a bio sunscreen emulsion for children, a sunscreen emulsion for adults, a toothpaste sample, a blush and five shampoo samples, using their ATR-FTIR spectra and the characteristic IR absorption bands of the analyzed synthetic plastics.