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----------------------------------------------------------{ April 17, 2008 }Colorant Environmental and Safety Data
We at Amerimulch are committed to your safety and the safety of our environment. When your pets or children run in, through, over and on mulch that has been colored with Heartland Enriched Colorants by Amerimulch, should this give you any pangs of concern? No! Mulch made with Heartland Enriched Colorants by Amerimulch is just as safe, if not safer, than conventional wood mulches. Here are the areas of safety concern that we at Amerimulch have addressed, consistent with industry leadership:
Question: What’s in the colorant? Is there anything in the Colorants that is toxic or dangerous?
Answer: No. The primary ingredients are water and iron oxide pigments, a family of colorants that is common in food and cosmetic applications. Anything is “dangerous,” if improperly used in too large a quantity. Heartland Enriched Colorants by Amerimulch are no more dangerous than common household substances like vinegar or liquid dish soap. Specifically, no chemical in the formulations is considered hazardous in the concentration amounts used in the colorant.
Question: Do your colorants have any heavy metals or lead or cadmium-based colors that are dangerous?
Answer: Heavy metals occur in nature, including soil and wood, in small trace amounts. In tests commissioned from independent laboratories, none of our products have tested above any reporting threshold levels for any heavy metals. That means that they contain no more heavy metals than regular wood mulches, or than the soil that the mulch is laid on.
Question: What about long-term exposure of your colorants to the environment? Are there any concerns about the Environmental Fate of your products?
Answer: No; none of our colorants require EPA reporting under any applicable regulations, including SARA sec 313, RCRA (Resource Conservation & Recovery Act), CERCLA (Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation & Liability Act), and TSCA (Toxic Substance Control Act).
Our customers satisfaction and product quality are always our primary focus. So, we are concerned about heavy metals, toxicity to any organism (plant, animal, human) and the “safety” of our products to include being user and environmentally friendly. See the chart, below, to compare test results of Amerimulch materials to the EPA’s maximum pollutant concentration* levels for certain materials allowed in soils and composts:
HEAVY METALS: Allowed Concentrations in Biosolids and Generally in Composts.
| ppm | Arsenic | Cadmium | Chromium | Copper | Lead | Mercury | Zinc |
| EPA Max (PC)* | 41 | 39 | 1200 | 1500 | 300 | 17 | 2800 |
| R345T | <0.79 | 20 | 80 | 220 | 14 | <0.019 | 55 |
| 901 BK | <0.77 | <0.38 | 1.3 | 5 | <0.96 | <0.02 | <1.9 |
| R101D | <0.75 | 18 | 69 | 30 | 4.5 | <0.02 | 65 |
| Iron Oxide (ys) | <0.78 | 33 | 87 | 82 | 6.7 | <0.02 | 41 |
| Iron Oxide (bs) | <0.78 | 35 | 120 | 23 | 7.4 | <0.02 | 26 |
Question: I’ve heard about something dangerous called VOC’s. Are these in your colorants?
Answer: The Heartland Enriched Colorants by Amerimulch do contain small amounts of VOC’s but we have had our colorants tested per EPA Method 24 for surface coatings and results are safely below reporting limits. VOC stands for Volatile Organic Compounds. When something is classified as “volatile,” it means that it evaporates readily at normal pressure and temperature – like water. The term “organic” means that it contains carbon.
While our colorants do contain very small amounts of VOC’s, the majority of the volatile content in our formulations is water. The remainder are solvents that we add for performance enhancement, and due to the very, very low amounts we use, they are harmless to plants, children and pets, and they simply vaporize into the atmosphere and cause no damage under normal conditions.
Question: Are your colorants safe for the workers in the plants that produce colored mulches? What about a Workplace Focus:
Answer: At Amerimulch, safety comes first for our employees and for our customers’ employees. Amerimulch employees are not exposed to hazardous chemicals, and neither are our customers’ employees – at least, not from the mulch colorants.
Each year MSDS sheets are sent to each of our customers, and any time a revision needs to be made, an updated MSDS sheet is sent out. These sheets are a great source of chemical information. Manufacturers of any raw material must provide a MSDS (material safety data sheet) to the purchaser of any chemical product, under regulations from OSHA (Occupational Safety & Health Administration). These regulations mandate that any material classified as hazardous in concentrations greater than 1% of the raw material, or 0.1% if carcinogenic, must be identified and listed on the MSDS under composition information on hazardous ingredients. Our MSDS sheets allow workers to see in print that Heartland Enriched Colorants by Amerimulch pose no threat to their health or safety
Question: What are your colorants made out of?
Answer: Heartland Enriched Colorants by Amerimulch consist of the following materials:
Pigments /colorants: 40 to 70% of the liquid colorant
The term colorant means a dye, pigment, or other substance that is used to impart color to a substrate material (the mulch). This same definition is used by the Food and Drug Administration - Department of Health and Human Services as follows: The term colorant means a dye, pigment, or other substance that is used to impart color to or to alter the color of a food-contact material. If we continue with the FDA’s code of federal regulations (21 CFR 178.3297), we’d find the list of materials (pigments and dyes) that may be used as colorants for food-contact to include iron oxides as a broad class of pigments without restrictions of use on that list. This list also contains chrome oxide, phthalocyanine blues and greens, titanium dioxide and even some of the carbon blacks (depending on raw material manufacturing processes). These are the pigment types we use.
Solvents: This chemical family complies with the same regulations as the below additive information.
Resins are typically polymeric substances like urethanes, styrene’s or acrylics. For liquid color dispersions, the resins are dispersions and their liquid vehicle carrier is a high percentage of water. They function as a binder. The resins we use are “safe”.
Additives: 1 to 5% of liquid colorant; Some additives can be hazardous in concentrated form but colorants use them in such extremely small quantities that they are not a health risk. Any of the additives we utilize in the colorant that meets the OSHA reporting requirement on the raw material MSDS from our vendors is NOT used in a concentration greater than 1% in our liquid colorants; they are “safe”.
If you have any further questions about the “safeness” of our colorants, or for support data regarding the safety of Heartland Enriched Colorants by Amerimulch, please call or contact your Amerimulch sales representative at 330-425-4244, or toll-free USA 888-556-3304.
Posted at 12:50 PM | Link to this Article