If you've spent any time reading nappy labels, you've probably come across two acronyms: TCF and ECF. Both refer to how the wood pulp inside a nappy's absorbent core gets bleached and whitened in colour. The difference between them says a lot about how far a brand is willing to go for a cleaner product.
Here's the breakdown, and why Joonya has chosen the TCF route.
Why bleaching pulp is even a conversation
The fluffy wood pulp at the center of a nappy starts out brown. To make it soft, absorbent, and white, manufacturers bleach it. Decades ago, that meant elemental chlorine gas, a process that produced dioxins as a byproduct. Dioxins are toxic, persistent compounds linked to serious health and environmental harm, and their discovery in pulp mill waste in the 1990s pushed the entire industry to change course.
Two safer bleaching methods emerged from that shift: ECF and TCF.
ECF: Elemental Chlorine Free
ECF nappies use chlorine dioxide instead of elemental chlorine gas. This greatly reduces dioxin formation, but trace, non-detectable to background-level amounts can still occur since a chlorine compound remains part of the process.
This keeps the honest point (ECF still involves chlorine chemistry, TCF doesn't) without overstating the health claim. Want me to drop this into the full post and regenerate the file, or are you still deciding on the wording?
TCF: Totally Chlorine Free
TCF diapers skip chlorine compounds altogether. Instead, the pulp is whitened using oxygen, hydrogen peroxide, or ozone. No chlorine, no chlorine derivatives, no dioxin risk from the bleaching process at all. It's a stricter standard, and a less common one, because it costs more and takes more energy and pulp to achieve the same result.
Why Joonya is proudly TCF
Joonya's nappies and pull-up cores are made from 100% chlorine-free wood fluff, bleached safely with oxygen and ozone rather than any chlorine-based agent. The wood pulp itself is FSC-certified, sourced from responsibly managed forests, so the sustainability commitment runs from the forest all the way through the bleaching process.
For Leanne and Rich, Joonya's founders, choosing TCF comes down to three things:
- No dioxins. Removing chlorine chemistry from the bleaching process entirely means there's no dioxin risk to begin with, not just a reduced one.
- Safer for skin. A nappy sits against a baby's skin nearly around the clock, for years. Anything that doesn't need to be in that equation, including chlorine chemistry, shouldn't be.
- Lower environmental chemical pollution. Oxygen and ozone bleaching avoids releasing chlorine-based byproducts into the environment during the wood pulp bleaching phase, unlike chlorine-based methods.
Choosing TCF means Joonya isn't relying on "it hasn't been shown to be harmful yet." It's removing the variable entirely.
Proving it, not just claiming it: independent testing with Eurofins
Plenty of brands say "chlorine-free" or "non-toxic" on the packaging. Joonya backs its claims with published, third-party lab results, because the company's founders discovered early on that the nappy industry doesn't always require brands to disclose everything they use, and that gap gets filled with a lot of marketing spin.
Joonya sends its nappies, pull-ups, and wipes to Eurofins, one of the world's largest independent testing and laboratory groups, for microbiological and chemical analysis. Results are interpreted by an independent Eurofins toxicologist and published publicly, not just summarized, the actual test report.
The Eurofins testing confirms Joonya products come back at 0% for a long list of substances people worry about most: fragrance, phthalates, pesticides, lotions, heavy metals, allergens, PAHs, PCBs, chlorine, and PFAS. Where a substance isn't detected, the report shows it as below the quantification limit rather than a flat "0", which is the more rigorous, honest way to report a non-detect in chemical analysis.
Click here to view the nappy & pull-up chemical test results by Eurofins Laboratory.
The bottom line
ECF is still a chlorine-based process, just a milder one than what the industry used decades ago. TCF removes chlorine chemistry from the bleaching process entirely. Joonya chose TCF for that reason, and then went further still by publishing independent Eurofins lab results so parents don't have to take the claim on faith. When something is against your baby's skin nearly 24 hours a day for years, "probably fine" isn't the bar. Proof is.