NEWS RELEASE                                                                                                                JULY 2012

Cleanroom Consumables Market to Reach $7 Billion Next Year 

The market for gowns, gloves, wipes and other consumables used in cleanrooms will be just over $7 billion in 2013 according to the latest forecasts in World Cleanroom Markets published by the McIlvaine Company. 

Cleanroom Consumables World Market ($ Millions)

The largest single market is the semiconductor industry.  Despite the increasing use of micro environments, the need for cleanroom consumables is strong.  The big advantage of micro environments is to remove the worker from the space which needs to remain clean. On the other hand, the increased vulnerability to small particles caused by finer line sizes on the chips, dictate greater investments in cleanliness.

One variation of semiconductor manufacturing with high growth is photovoltaics. Solar panel components are made with semiconductor technology. There are a number of large manufacturing facilities in Asia with very large cleanrooms. 

Workers are the greatest source of contamination. Therefore, gowns, gloves and other apparel are specially designed to keep skin particles from entering the cleanroom environment while also keeping the worker comfortable.

The pharmaceutical industry is less concerned about small particles and more concerned about live micro-organisms.  Masks as well as garments are utilized to prevent human contamination of products.  The pharmaceutical industry prefers single use garments because of viable organism concerns. The semiconductor industry prefers high quality reusable garments because of the low particle shedding and good filtration characteristics.

Asia is both the largest user and supplier of cleanroom consumables. The region is a net exporter of consumables to the rest of the world. This is a big change over the decade. Asia was previously a net importer.

Two types of companies are dominating the ultimate distribution of consumables to the users. One group consists of laundries or processors such as Prudential or Aramark who rent garments and also supply the range of consumables.  The other is the traditional large distributor of supplies such as Thermo-Fisher or VWR.

For more information on World Cleanroom Markets, click on: http://www.mcilvainecompany.com/brochures/cleanroom.html