What is the current use of tank-mix adjuvants?
Producers of pesticides may incorporate an adjuvant into the formulation (‘built-in adjuvant’). Adjuvant producers can recommend, sometimes in collaboration with the producer of the active ingredient, to add an adjuvant to the treatment solution (‘tank-mix adjuvant’). In the USA (Uttley 1995) the use of emulsifiable oils (110ML/year) exceeds that of surfactant as tank-mix adjuvant (20ML/year) (Figure 1). Figure 1: Annual use of tank mix-adjuvants in the USA. Figure based on two sources (McWhorter 1982 and Uttley 1995). In Europe (Uttley 1995), the volumes of emulsifiable oils (9ML) equals the use of surfactants (11ML). The graph in figure 1 stops at the mid nineties. As far as we know, use of adjuvants continued to increase since then. Nowadays, the worldwide (tank-mix) adjuvant market is estimated as a one billion USD market with the USA having a relatively larger share of 40% (Underwood et al 2001).
