"Up until about 2005, the main application of halloysites had...

"Up until about 2005, the main application of halloysites had been as an alternative raw material to kaolinite for ceramics. Since then, however, there has been an exponential increase in studies aimed at applications of halloysite nanotubes, now widely referred to as HNTs (Fig. 1). The readily available and relatively cheap nanotubular forms of halloysite have potential uses in nanocomposites with polymers, as carriers for active agents, e.g. in medicine, agriculture, cosmetics and environmental remediation, as well as in nanotemplating, as supports for catalyst immobilization and as heterogeneous catalysts (Pasbakhsh et al. , 2013; Churchman & Pasbakhsh, 2015; Yuan et al. , 2015). They also hold promise for other medical uses besides drug delivery, e.g. in wound dressing and tissue engineering scaffolds (Lecouvet, 2015; Abdullayev, 2015), as anti-inflammatory agents (Cervini-Silva et al. , 2015) and in water filtration (Makaremi et al. , 2015). Indeed, many niche uses for halloysite, especially following their functionalization with chemical and biochemical agents, continue to be proposed and studied. These include their use for the storage of gases, including oxygen (Cavallaro et al. , 2014) and hydrogen (Jin et al. , 2015), as environmental and bio-sensors (Abdullayev, 2015; Sheng et al. , 2015), and for the uptake of spilled oil (Cavallaro et al. , 2015). A further remarkable feature is that the number of patents filed that include the word ‘halloysite’ in the title or the abstract closely parallel the rising trend in the number of halloysite scientific papers (Fig. 1). Since 2005, the number of patents has virtually equalled the number of papers on HNTs. These observations provide clear evidence that research on halloysite is readily translated into important new technologies, perhaps to a greater extent than the research on any other clay mineral."

https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-rise-and-rise-of-halloysite-Churchman-Pasbakhsh/f6342e92a7da1c2fdb021c3284e2c3332cc51ad7




Halloysite is tiny now, but growing exponentially. I can't wait to see where halloysite research and applications is in 10 years.

Here is example of a tremendous application in food packaging.
European research has shown halloysite can be loaded with antimicrobials (i.e. commercially available silver-based additives) and then combined with standard plastic packaging. This increases shelf life significantly. That's a world wide market. It's a while away, but IMO it is a matter of when, not if.

This is one of 100s of papers and patents being researched each year and that number will continue to grow exponentially as the graph above suggests.