The manufacture of nonwoven fabrics is similar with cloth products and base on chemical fibers as basic raw materials by chemical or hot melt banding. It is called nonwoven because it is the cloth directly made from high polymer slice,staple fiber or filament through air flow or machine,and then be strenthened by spunlacing, needle punching or hot rolling intead of being woven. The characteristics of Nonwoven industry is short technological process, high output, low cost, fast variety change and wide source of raw materials. According to technological process, nonwoven fabrics can be devided into spunlace nonwoven, spunbonded nonwovens, melt blown nonwovens, needle punched nonwovens, stitchbond nonwovens, etc.
Nonwoven fabrics have many excellent functions and wide applications. According to their uses, nonwoven fabrics can be divided into garment nonwoven fabrics, leather and shoemaking nonwoven fabrics, household decoration and home nonwoven fabrics, medical and health nonwoven fabrics, filter materials nonwoven fabrics, industrial nonwoven fabrics, automotive industry nonwoven fabrics, packaging nonwoven fabrics, agricultural and horticultural nonwoven fabrics, military nonwoven fabrics and nonwoven fabrics for national defense industry. In recent years, the growth rate of world demand for nonwoven fabrics has always been higher than that of the global economy. Global nonwoven production is mainly concentrated in the United States, accounting for 41% of the world total, 30% in Western Europe, 8% in Japan, 3.5% in China and 17.5% in other regions.

 

Compared with Europe and the United States, China's nonwoven industry starts late, but developes rapidly. In the early 1980s, production was less than 10,000 tons. In the mid and late 1990s, China sets off a climax of developing nonwoven products. In addition to the use of domestic production lines, there are also introduced production lines from abroad in Guangdong, Zhejiang, Jiangxi and Hunan provinces. China's nonwoven products have greatly exceeded the average development speed of the textile industry, growing at a high rate of 8-10% annually, and they are the fastest growing industry in the textile industry. Because China's nonwoven industry has become superior, there are strong competitiveness between many enterprises and products in the world . Through years of exploration and development, China's nonwoven enterprises have taken the road with distinct  characteristics.
At present, China's nonwoven industry has achieved sales revenue more than RMB 100 billion, an increase of 49.61% over the previous year, and realized profits of RMB 6.28billion, an increase of 58.16% over the previous year, average employees of 13.556 million people. In the future, if China's nonwoven manufacturing industry wants to develop better, it should focus on adjusting the variety structure, improving the grade, and changing to diversification, serialization, specialization and high performance. In the next ten years, the demand for nonwoven fabrics in various application industries will continue to increase. Subdivision, functionalization and industrialization will become the direction of technical research and development in non-woven fabrics.