At 2:00 p.m. on August 2, 2011, the China Detergent Industry Association held an expert media meeting on the safety of fluorescent brighteners for detergents at the China Science and Technology Hall in Beijing. The experts invited to this meeting are all well-known professors and researchers in China who are engaged in toxicology, medicine, fluorescent brighteners, detergents, textiles, and dyes research. Experts from all walks of life interpreted fluorescent brighteners from their own professional perspectives and came to a unanimous conclusion: fluorescent brighteners for detergents are safe for the human body, friendly to the environment, and are irreplaceable functional additives in washing products.
Professor Shen Yongjia, an expert in fluorescent brightener research and a doctoral supervisor at East China University of Science and Technology, said that fluorescent brighteners are an optical conditioning agent. Its working principle is to convert invisible ultraviolet light into blue light visible to the naked eye, which is superimposed with the yellow light of the fabric itself to emit white light, achieving a soft and pleasing whitening effect. It has long been widely used in many fields such as textiles, papermaking, detergents, and plastics. Professor Shen believes that the statement that "fluorescent whitening agents are a layer of white stuff applied on clothes to cover stains" is ridiculous, because fluorescent whitening agents, like water, are transparent and colorless and cannot cover stains at all. We add it to laundry detergent because it has a color conditioning function that cannot be replaced by any product.
Toxicologist, Professor Wu Zhigang of the Department of Labor and Environmental Hygiene, Tongji Medical College, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, emphasized that the acute toxicity level of fluorescent whitening agents used in detergents is equivalent to that of table salt, non-teratogenic, non-carcinogenic, non-mutagenic, non-irritating to the skin, does not cause skin allergies, is not absorbed through the skin, and has no adverse effects on wound healing. Even if ingested by mistake, it will not accumulate in the body and can be quickly and completely excreted from the body through normal metabolism. In addition, he also mentioned that fluorescent whitening agents used in detergents are safe and harmless to the environment, are easily degradable, and will not accumulate in organisms. Fluorescent whitening agents for clothing detergents have been used for more than 40 years around the world, and their safety has been recognized by scientists, government departments and relevant institutions in various countries.