Polyvinyl chloride (PVC) is the world's second largest general plastic. 30% of PVC are flexible products and have been extensively used in artificial leather, food packing, electric wire, children's toys, etc. Di(2-ethylhexyl)phthalate (DEHP) is the most widely used plasticizer in flexible PVC for it's excellent performances, such as good compatibility with PVC, high plasticizing efficiency, low cost, no effect on safety and electrical insulation of products, and so on. But DEHP is a small molecule compound and is associated with PVC through secondary bond rather than chemical bond, and its content is usually as high as 30~50 wt%, thus it can easily migrate from PVC matrix into external medium, which causes deterioration of flexible PVC's properties and environmental pollution. In sensitive areas such as children's toys and medical devices, migration of DEHP can also be hazardous to human health. So migration of DEHP has aroused wide concern and is exigent to be solved. In this paper, issues caused by migration of DEHP and the current bans and controversies on its usage are introduced. Then the countermeasures and recent scientific approaches in dealing with these issues are comprehensively reviewed. In the end, advantages and disadvantages of the various approaches are summarized in order to research more in-depth and more effectively in the near future.

Contents
1 Introduction
2 Migration of DEHP and its controversies
3 Use restrictions and bans of DEHP
4 Solutions to reduce migration of plasticizers in flexible PVC
4.1 Migration resistant plasticizers
4.2 Increasing interactions between plasticizer and PVC
4.3 Surface treatment
5 Conclusion and outlook