Wet wipes are the knights in shining armor for most women. If the grime and the dust have taken the better of you, pulling out a wet wipe and feeling its cool and fresh surface touch your face is blissful. Removing your makeup, cleaning your hands, sanitizing your phone, wet wipes sure have come a long way from being used for only cleaning babies.
For those of you who don’t know what they are already, wet wipes are small pieces of moistened paper or non-woven fabric that are pre-folded and packed individually, for convenience’s sake. They are generally used for cleaning disinfecting or for cleaning.
Did you know that wet wipes came into existence in the late 1970s as people began to travel more and began to realize the need for quickly cleaning themselves, without having to stop at any hotel? As with any other product, initially, the cost of the machinery to produce wet wipes was very high, allowing only big brands like Kimberly-Clark or Procter & Gamble to purchase them. However, with time the technology to produce these moist towel-like things became more affordable and smaller firms could also produce them.
There are many interesting steps that go into the manufacturing of a wet wipe, from preparing the fabric, the solution to fabric treatment and finally its packaging.
For one, there are two ways that the non-woven fabric can be prepared: a dry one that uses plastic resins to make fabric and another that uses slurry composed of cotton fibre, water and some chemicals to make a softer variety. The machine presses the paste flat by using rollers. These rolls, once dried, are further cut into individual sheets.
The wipe solution is made in big batch tanks that contain water and other desired ingredients and is mixed until they reach a homogeneous state. The coating machinery applies the cleanser onto the fabric rolls by spraying the formula onto the rolls or by running the rolls through a trough containing the solution. Once the cleansing formula has been applied on the fabric rolls, it’s time for them to be folded and transferred for final packaging requirements.
Wet wipe manufacturing machine is subject to strict quality controls that require the wipes to pass various quality checks through the whole process of manufacturing. The plastic packaging that contains the wipes, the properties of the fabric itself and the mildness of the solution, are all tested to ensure that wet wipes can only give you a sense of satisfaction rather than disappointment.