Seeking breakthrough approaches to improve environmental impact of detergents

Background: household cleaners, for laundry or for cleaning surfaces, are built on typical ingredients such as surfactants, builders and polymers, to impart specific functionalities associated to cleaning: surfactants are used for wetting and emulsification, builders to manage water hardness and polymers to suspend soils and improve cleaning. Intrinsic to their specific function is the fact that these chemicals must be formulated in a certain amount, must be obviously synthesized and are disposed of at the end of the cleaning job. LCA measures the impact these factors altogether.

Our objective is to develop innovative cleaners whose LCA is reduced majorly thanks to three approaches:

1. Reduce the amount of chemicals needed for a specific cleaning action, e.g. have surfactants much more effective at very low concentration or catalytic actives that carry out soil removal with high weight efficiency
2. Renew origin of chemicals, having actives whose sourcing and manufacture is not depleting valuable natural or fossil resources. Ideally we would like materials of bio-based origin that are manufactured starting from recovered waste materials
3. Replace chemicals which can have adverse impact on the environment with more biodegradable, less harmful, no-concern options

Possible solution areas:

The following are examples of proposals that would match our needs.

• Catalytic species for cleaning, including new enzymes capable of delivering enhanced benefits vs available ones
• New surface-active agents with superior emulsification properties
• Builders/polymers with no favorable environmental impact, e.g. non phosphonate

Evaluation of the proposals:

• We will evaluate candidate materials if they are available at least on gram scale for laboratory testing for cleaning performance; no ideas or paper solutions will be evaluated.
• We will also consider formulation approaches using traditional chemicals or disruptive product ideas, provided these can be put together in a working prototype to be shared with us
• We will ask for reasons why the materials/products should have a significantly more favourable LCA vs existing chemicals/products