Chapter 2: Plant-derived Fire Retardants

Bio-based fire retardants represent one of the most promising directions of next-generation fire retardants due to their sustainability, environmental benefits and comparable efficiency to current non-based counterparts. Many plant-derived feedstocks, such as lignin, phytic acid (PA), polysaccharides (e.g., alginates) and furan as well as their derivatives, have shown promising applications in creating fire-retardant polymeric materials. This chapter focuses on their use as fire retardants, alone or in combination with other fire retardants, or as starting materials for synthesizing bio-based fire retardants through chemical modifications for some typical polymers. Meanwhile, they can be physically blended with polymer matrices or chemically included into the backbone or side chains of polymers to develop fire-retardant polymer biocomposites. The impacts of these plant-based fire retardants on the thermal and fire retardancy properties of polymers are discussed. Key challenges and future perspectives are also proposed to expedite the applications of these plant-derived fire retardants in industry.