The Prices of Disposable Gloves Are Reaching Heights and Here’s why

Ever since the world has been struck by COVID-19, sanitary and cleaning products are being used widely. Especially if you work at a restaurant, school, or healthcare industry, you must use products like face masks, disposable gloves, sanitizers, tissues, paper towels, etc. at a large scale. That’s because sanitation is of utmost importance today and strict rules from the government have been passed to keep these places sanitized at all times. For instance, if you are a restaurant owner offering dine-in facility; you would have to sanitize your tables and chairs after the visit of each customer.

In the entire process of sanitizing any place, one product that is to be used largely is disposable gloves. You will have to use disposable gloves every time you sanitize a place, and even when you are performing regular tasks at work in order to ensure proper hygiene is maintained. Hence, disposable gloves like Vinyl, Latex, Nitrile and even the Poly gloves which normally used for food serving, are in high demand. This demand has led to a dramatic increase in their prices worldwide. However, the sudden increase in prices is not just because of its high demand, but also because of the environmental changes and unavailability of raw materials.

Latex, the natural raw material used in latex gloves is obtained from the rubber trees, but due to heavy rainfall in areas of tree plantations, it cannot be cultivated properly. This has resulted in 75% surge of the price of latex, which in turn has caused an escalation in the cost of disposable latex gloves. Besides, the demand of the disposable gloves is only intensifying with time and since the supply is not equal to demand, there is a rapid increase in its cost. And the cost will not see any downfall in the near future but will only increase unpredictably, at least until COVID-19 is around.

Prices of vinyl gloves are also soaring because of the recent shutdown of the industries in China which has had a significant impact on the supply of vinyl gloves all over the world. Whereas, for nitrile gloves, the chief monomer butadiene has been largely purchased by tire manufacturing industries, hence has resulted in shortage of supply.

All of these reasons have resulted in an upsurge of prices for all types of disposable gloves. The situation has arisen due to high demand of disposable gloves in various industries, schools and restaurants because of COVID-19 and you can only expect the prices to go up each month.