This is big news, especially in the surfactants market.

Consumer Products Company Unilever announced this week that it will convert 100% of its fossil-based raw materials in its cleaning and laundry product formulations with renewable or recycled carbon. This move is set to transform the sustainability of the company’s global cleaning and laundry brands including Omo (Persil), Sunlight, Cif and Domestos.

This new ambition is a core component of Unilever’s ‘Clean Future’, a ground-breaking innovation programme designed by the company’s Home Care division to fundamentally change the way that some of the world’s best-known cleaning and laundry products are created, manufactured and packaged. Clean Future is unique in its intent to embed the circular economy principles into both packaging and product formulations at the scale of global brands to reduce their carbon footprint.

The first initiative of its scale, Clean Future is a critical step towards Unilever’s pledge of net zero emissions from its products by 2039. The chemicals used in Unilever’s cleaning and laundry products make up the greatest proportion of their carbon footprint (46%) across their lifecycle. Therefore, by transitioning away from fossil fuel-derived chemicals in product formulations, the company will unlock novel ways of reducing the carbon footprint of some of the world’s biggest cleaning and laundry brands. Unilever expects this initiative alone to reduce the carbon footprint of the product formulations by up to 20%.

“We’ve seen unprecedented demand for our cleaning products in recent months and we are incredibly proud to play our part, helping to keep people safe in the fight against Covid-19. But that should not be a reason for complacency. We cannot let ourselves become distracted from the environmental crises that our world – our home – is facing. Pollution. Destruction of natural habitats. The climate emergency. This is the home we share, and we have a responsibility to protect it.”

Another interesting information on this announcement is that Unilever is ring-fencing (I had to google this word) €1 billion for Clean Future to finance biotechnology research, CO2 and waste utilisation, and low carbon chemistry. This investment will be used to create biodegradable and water-efficient product formulations, to halve the use of virgin plastic by 2025, and support the development of brand communications that make these technologies appealing to consumers.

The Clean Future investment, which is additional to Unilever’s new €1 billion ‘Climate and Nature fund’, is focused on creating affordable cleaning and laundry products that deliver superior cleaning results with a significantly lower environmental impact.

Clean Future already supports industry-leading projects around the world to transform how the chemicals in Unilever’s cleaning and laundry products are made. In Slovakia, for instance, Unilever is partnering with biotechnology leader Evonik Industries to develop the production of rhamnolipids, a renewable and biodegradable surfactant which is already used in its Sunlight dishwashing liquid in Chile and Vietnam. In Tuticorin in Southern India, Unilever is sourcing soda ash – an ingredient in laundry powders – made using a pioneering CO₂ capture technology. The soda ash is made with the CO₂ emissions from the energy used in the production process. Both technologies are hoped to be scaled significantly under the programme.

…does this mean that we will be hearing about capacity expansion for Evonik’s rhamnolipids soon? By the way, my Tecnon OrbiChem special report last month about bio-surfactants will soon be released for free. Stay tune.

Unilever also talked about its ‘Carbon Rainbow’ approach to diversify the carbon used in its product formulations. Non-renewable fossil sources of carbon (identified in the Carbon Rainbow as black carbon) will be replaced using captured CO₂ (purple carbon), plants and biological sources (green carbon), marine sources such as algae (blue carbon), and carbon recovered from waste materials (grey carbon). The sourcing of carbon under the Carbon Rainbow will be governed and informed by environmental impact assessments and work with Unilever’s industry-leading sustainable sourcing programmes to prevent unintended pressures on land use.

The Clean Future programme is already funding research & development into projects such as:

• Purple carbon (carbon capture and utilisation to produce soda ash and other chemicals)
• Green carbon (rhamnolipids surfactant derived from terrestrial biomass)
• Grey carbon (surfactant derived from plastic waste)
• Biodegradability (biodegradable cleaning polymers)
• Low-carbon formulations (weight-efficient ingredients)

So Unilever explained a bit what Renewable Carbon is about. Renewable and recycled carbon entails all carbon sources that replace the use of fossil carbon from the geosphere. Renewable carbon can come from the biosphere and atmosphere. Recycled carbon comes from the technosphere. Renewable and recycled carbon circulates between biosphere, atmosphere and technosphere, creating a circular carbon economy.

By the way, Nova-Institute (disclaimer: The green blogger participates in their biopolymer and bio-based building blocks reporting) just released a report about its first survey on renewable carbon in the chemical industry. According to the survey, there is a slight but steady increase in the bio-based share of the organic chemical industry in the EU-28 from about 10.7% in 2008 to 14.9% in 2017.  The current average renewable carbon share in the European chemical and plastic industry lies between 20-25% (15% from biomass and 5-10% from recycling).

The results of the survey clustered chemical companies by their branch and share of renewable carbon into the following four groups:

• Traditional petrochemical companies show renewable carbon shares of 1-5%.
• Several wood-based chemical companies show renewable shares of 80-90%.
• In between is a group of mainly chemical companies with a traditional focus on plant oils and animal fats showing 40-50% renewable carbon shares.
• Notably, a small number of petrochemical companies, which had renewable carbon shares of <1% in the past, already developed to shares around 20%.

Back to Unilever, the company is a founding Advisory Board member of the Renewable Carbon Initiative (RCI), an emerging coalition from the Nova Institute, which aims to bring renewable carbon to the political stage and to develop and implement a sustainable future for the chemical and plastics industry. If your business is interested in finding out more, visit the Nova Institute website.

If you have an idea for an innovation, solution or opportunity to partner with Unilever to accelerate its Clean Future programme, get in touch through the company’s Sustainability Partnerships and Open Innovation Submission Portal.