AGATEX News

Erfahre Mehr

Four functions from one source: AGATEX at OUTLOOK™ 2026 in Cascais

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From 22 to 24 September 2026 the nonwovens industry meets at the Hotel Miragem in Cascais. OUTLOOK™, EDANA’s conference for hygiene and personal care, is being held for the 25th time this year. AGATEX is an EDANA member and will be there.

 

One web, four requirements

 

Designing a hygiene nonwoven today does not mean solving one problem. It means solving four, usually at the same time.

 

The topsheet has to wet fast, repeatedly, and give nothing back. The back sheet and the barrier layers have to repel. On the card the web must not build up static, or fibre fly, web uniformity and line speed all suffer. And as soon as a nonwoven moves towards vehicle interiors, medical or construction, flame retardancy is added on top.

 

In many projects those four functions arrive from four different suppliers — four contacts, four document packages, four schedules. At AGATEX they come from one.

 

The four functional finishes

 

Hydrophilic finishes — LAMBAFIL®. Durable and temporary hydrophilic finishes for topsheet, ADL and corewrap, for hygiene, medical and agriculture. Designed for PP, PET, PLA, viscose, lyocell and bicomponent fibres, applied on the fibre as a spin finish or on the web — inline at the oven, by foulard, or through the bath.

 

Water repellent finishes — LAMBAPHOB®. PFAS-free, based on natural raw materials and readily biodegradable to OECD 301. In use for back sheet and barrier layers, agricultural fleeces, roofing membranes and outdoor applications.

 

Antistatic agents — LAMBAFELT®. For PP, PET and PA nonwovens in spunbond, meltblown and needlepunch. Antistatic is the finish that appears least often in the specification and costs the line most often — fibre fly at the card, wraps, stoppages.

 

Flame retardants — CABERTEX®. Halogen-free finishes tested to FMVSS 302 and ECE R118, complemented by barrier function and oil and chemical resistance. Main applications are vehicle interiors, headliners, filter media, protective textiles and construction.

 

The range is completed by wetting agents (LAMBATOL®) and defoamers for spunlace water circuits (LAMEX®).

 

www.agatex-nonwovens.com

Where the formulations are built

 

Behind the four product families sits our own application technology centre, the AGATEX Innovation Center. It runs what would otherwise have to be tried out on the customer’s production line:

 

– Fibre carding

– Nonwoven application on a laboratory foulard

– Fibre sink time measurement

– Hygiene nonwoven testing: lister, wetback and run-off tests to EDANA methods

– Analytics: HPLC, GC, Soxhlet extraction, tensile testing

 

This is why AGATEX formulations do not come out of a catalogue. A customer sends their substrate, we set the finish to it, measure in house and supply the figures with the product. The trial series on the production line therefore does not start from zero.

 

Why a European producer

 

AGATEX has been developing and producing chemical auxiliaries since 1921 — at its home site in Edt bei Lambach, Upper Austria, and now from a second production site in Prachinburi, Thailand. For European nonwoven producers that means production inside the EU, a REACH compliant way of working, certification to ISO 9001 and ISO 14001, short routes and one contact instead of a supply chain running across several continents.

 

Let’s meet in Cascais

 

Thomas Maier, Head of Application Technology, will be at OUTLOOK™ 2026. Whether it is a specific finishing task, a substrate change, or the question of which function can realistically be applied on your line — we will take the time.

 

Book a meeting: office@agatex.at · +43 7245 32341-0 · www.agatex.at

AGATEX at Paper Middle East 2026

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Every Pinhole Started as a Bubble
From 15 to 17 September, PAPER-ME 2026 brings the paper, board, tissue and packaging industry of the Middle East and Africa together at the Egypt International Exhibition Center in Cairo. We won’t have a booth this year — we’ll be walking the halls, notebooks open. And frankly, that’s the part we look forward to most: the unscripted conversation at someone else’s stand, the problem described in three sentences that turns into a six-month development project.
Because the region is moving. New tissue capacity, more recycled furnish, rising quality expectations on coated grades — and every one of those shifts lands, eventually, as a chemistry question. Here are the three we hear most, and why we think each one is solvable.
1. Tissue: you don’t have to trade softness for a calm machine
Tissue is the hardest place to add anything. Softness, absorbency and purity are the product, and every additive is a potential threat to all three. Meanwhile modern machine speeds generate foam faster than almost any other grade, and hygiene and food-contact requirements rule out a good part of the conventional toolbox.
Good news: that trade-off is far less binding than it used to be. Silicone-free LAMEX® defoamers are where we point tissue producers first — not out of ideology, but because silicone-free formulations sidestep the deposit and rewetting issues that reappear later as spots, holes, or a sheet that no longer absorbs the way the spec promises. Foam gets controlled in the process and white water. Softness and rewetting stay exactly where they belong.
We make silicone-based grades too, and sometimes they’re the right call. What matters is that the decision gets made deliberately, for your system — not inherited from whatever happened to be in the tank last year.
2. The coating colour: win back the air you can’t see
Coating — Deckstrich — is where trapped air turns into visible money. A coating colour gets stirred, pumped, screened and applied, and picks up air at every stage. What arrives at the applicator as micro-foam leaves the machine as pinholes, streaks and craters, usually discovered several steps too late.
The encouraging part: these are two distinct jobs, and once you separate them, both get much easier.
  • LAMEX® deaerators release the air already entrained in the colour, so the applied film comes out homogeneous instead of pockmarked. Silicone-free options earn their keep especially in graphic and coated grades, where any silicone carry-over shows up as spots on a surface that’s meant to be flawless.
  • LAMBATOL® wetting agents lower surface tension, improving how the colour wets the base paper and how the film levels out. Faster, more even flow-out — fewer streaks, fewer fish-eyes.
The same LAMBATOL® chemistry pulls a second shift elsewhere in the mill: as emulsifiers stabilising oil-in-water and water-in-oil systems, with ASA emulsification for sizing as the classic case.
3. Closed loops: a challenge worth taking on
Packaging and board mills running high recycled content in ever-tighter water systems face a compounding problem: everything accumulates. Surfactants concentrate, foam turns chronic rather than occasional, additive consumption creeps up year after year. This is exactly the terrain our high-performance LAMEX® formulations for closed circuits were built for — and the target isn’t knocking down today’s visible foam. It’s a genuinely calm loop and a machine that simply runs.
Let’s test it before it ever reaches your machine
Most of this is system-specific. The same defoamer behaves differently in two mills running nominally the same grade — so we’d rather prove it than promise it.
That’s what the AGATEX Innovation Center (AIC) is for: dynamic foam tests evaluating both foam collapse and foam prevention in your process water, measurement of wetting and impregnation times, lab sheets comparing formation and homogeneity. Fewer trials on your machine, shorter development cycles, faster answers.
A 100-year-old company that still likes hard problems
We’ve been making specialty chemicals since 1921, with synthesis and formulation under one roof — no dependency on external key raw materials, and the freedom to build a formulation around your system instead of offering the nearest catalogue match. Developed and produced REACH-compliant, in a plant running on 100% renewable energy.
Come find us in Cairo
Our Sales Manager Lorenzo Zaazou is on-site all three days of PAPER-ME. If you run tissue, board or coated grades in the region and any of this sounds familiar, come and say hello — twenty minutes in the aisle beats any brochure.
See you in Cairo. Let’s solve something.

Fibre Quality Is Determined in the Opening Process

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 Agatex has developed and industrially validated PFAS-free processing aids that reduce short fibres and dust while improving fibre length, carding performance and spinnability.

The Bottleneck Lies in the Opening Process

Mechanical recycling is considered the fastest route to industrially scaling the recovery of textile waste into the material cycle. Its central problem is physical in nature: during tearing, the textile is broken down through fibre-to-fibre and fibre-to-metal friction. The result is shorter fibres, a higher proportion of short fibres and dust. These three factors determine whether a recyclate can be processed on the card – and to what extent it can be blended with virgin material. Public debate on the circular economy focuses primarily on sorting, collection and logistics. The opening process itself, however, is often treated as a given. Yet this is where the available fibre quality is determined.

Developed, Validated and Implemented on an Industrial Scale

Based on these findings, Agatex has developed its own range of processing aids for the tearing process. For validation, it was essential to demonstrate the effect not merely at laboratory scale, but across the entire processing chain. To this end, the company is working in partnership with the Recycling Atelier of ITA Augsburg. The Recycling Atelier replicates the mechanical recycling chain on an industrial-scale basis – from preparation and the tearing process through to web formation and yarn production. This made it possible to assess what effect a processing aid has in the tearing machine and how much of that effect is actually carried through to the downstream stages. An effect that can be detected in fibre-length measurements but no longer has any impact in carding is of no practical value to the processor. The validated formulations are now being used in industrial applications.

Measurement Results

A tearing aid from the range was tested against an untreated reference:

Parameter I Change compared with reference

Mean fibre length +11.5%

Short-fibre content -10%

Dust generation -57.6%

The last two figures are particularly relevant for further processing. A lower short-fibre content improves fibre control in the card and therefore the evenness of the web. Less dust means fewer deposits on the card clothing and in the extraction system, longer cleaning intervals and more stable line performance. The reduction in dust is also relevant from an occupational hygiene perspective – an aspect that has so far received too little attention in discussions about increasing recyclate content.

The Effect Extends Beyond the Tearing Machine

For practical applications, it is crucial that the effect is not limited to the opening process. The treated fibre carries its modified surface properties into the downstream stages, where the benefits are in some cases even more pronounced than during the tearing process itself. In carding, reduced friction produces a visibly more uniform carding web. Fibre passage becomes smoother, while the tendency to form laps and fibre accumulation on the card clothing is reduced. Less dust in the system also means fewer contaminants in the web. In spinning, this results in improved and faster spinnability: the material can be drafted more consistently, allowing higher delivery speeds without compromising process reliability. For processors seeking to increase the proportion of recyclate, this is often the decisive factor – not the fibre length recorded in a test report, but whether the line can process the material cleanly and at the desired speed.

LAMBAFIL R – A Range Designed Around the Process

The development work has resulted in the Lambafil R range. It is not designed as a single-product solution: because friction behaviour varies significantly depending on the fibre type, the range is differentiated according to the composition of the incoming material stream and tailored to the relevant process step.

Lambafil R100 – for synthetic-rich recycled materials

Lambafil R200 – for cotton and cellulosic recycled materials

Lambafil R300 – for PET-rich recycled materials

Lambafil R400 – for PET/cotton blends

All products in the range are formulated without PFAS. The specific configuration is application-dependent: the composition of the incoming material stream, the machine setup and the target quality of the recyclate determine the product selection, application point and application rate.
Agatex Feinchemie GmbH will be exhibiting at Dornbirn GFC 2026.

Article: https://textile-network.com/en/Technical-Textiles/Fasern-Garne/Fibre-Quality-Is-Determined-in-the-Opening-Process