Sustainable Personal Protective Clothing for Healthcare Applications: A Review

Personal protective equipment (PPE) is critical to protect healthcare workers (HCWs) from highly infectious diseases such as the Covid-19. However, hospitals have been at risk of running out of the safe and effective PPE including personal protective clothing needed to treat patients with Covid-19, due to unprecedented global demand. In addition, there are only limited manufacturing facilities of such clothing available worldwide, due to a lack of available knowledge about relevant technologies, ineffective supply chains and stringent regulatory requirements. Therefore, there remains a clear unmet need for coordinating the actions and efforts from scientists, engineers, manufacturers, suppliers and regulatory bodies to develop and produce safe and effective protective clothing using the technologies that are locally available around the world. In this review, we discuss currently used personal protective equipment, their quality and the associated regulatory standards. We survey the current state-of-the-art anti-microbial functional finishes on fabrics to protect the wearer against viruses and bacteria, and provide an overview of protective medical fabric manufacturing techniques, their supply chains and the environmental impacts of current single-use synthetic fibre-based protective clothing. Finally, we discuss future research directions, which include increasing efficiency, safety and availability of personal protective clothing worldwide without conferring environmental problems.