Be it cars, buildings, or toys, everything has some kind of paint or coating. Apart from just making the product look good, such materials also protect them from external factors, such as heat, chemicals, moisture, and scratches. Owing to the vast diversity in the substrates they are applied on, including metals, glass, wood, concrete, and plastics, a wide array of paints and coatings are available, such as can coatings, coil coatings, decorative or architectural coatings, and industrial coatings.

According to P&S Intelligence, with the increasing demand for paints and coatings in various industries, the esters market will witness considerable growth in the near future. This is because esters are among the most-important ingredients of such products, being primarily used as a tail solvent, on account of their high solvency and slow evaporation. The solubility and miscibility flexibility of esters with a vast variety of organic solvents and resins, respectively, allows them to be added to numerous types of coatings with an acrylic, alkyd, vinyl copolymer, or polyester base.

Apart from paints & coatings and lubricants, other applications of esters are personal care & cosmetics, textiles, surfactants, packaging, paper & pulp, food & beverages, water treatment, and healthcare. Overall, textiles are the largest application area of esters, as a result of their usage as softeners, emulsifiers, and antistatic agents. Additionally, due to their lubricity, esters are used as surfactants in textile factories. Moreover, yarn and threads of polyesters, which are essentially chemicals where every repeating unit of the primary chain contains an ester group, are widely used to produce shirts, jackets, pants, furniture upholstery, blankets, bedsheets, and a range of other clothing and apparel items.

In the coming years, the usage of such chemicals is expected to rise rapidly in the personal care & cosmetics industry, because of the high demand for lauric, stearic, and oleic acid esters for manufacturing emulsifiers, skin conditioning emollients, and moisturizers. Other uses of esters in this industry are odor cosmetics and haircare and skincare products, on account of their lubricating, moisturizing, protective, softening, and conditioning properties. In addition, esters provide a glossy and light texture, therefore reduce the heavy and oily feeling that comes from the pigments and ultraviolet (UV) absorbers generally present in numerous personal care products.

Therefore, with the growing automotive, construction, persona care & cosmetics, and textiles sectors, due to the booming population and government support for them, the demand for various types of esters will rise too.