Beyond the hero molecule: A platform-first approach to biobased surfactants
Shawn Eady and Ellen Murphy of Sironix Renewables explain why manufacturability came before application in developing its new class of biobased surfactants *
Most disruptive biobased surfactants begin life as a hero molecule with an intended purpose. A new ingredient performs beautifully at gram scale in property assessment and application testing. Its synthesis method demonstrates sufficient efficiency and consistency to project economic feasibility.
Finally, a paper follows. From there, the market, the feedstock and the manufacturing route are typically built backwards around it. That is where many promising chemistries stop as incompatibilities with scalable processes or high custom equipment costs thwart the already challenging path to market as a start-up.
In order to keep emerging technology funded and viable, manufacturing routes need to be considered earlier on and teams must be flexible around target markets. Choosing that target market is an art in and of itself as surfactants can be used across many industries.
Sironix Renewables chose personal care, shampoos, body washes and lotions as its beachhead market. The formulators who build those products set a high bar for biobased ingredient entry: new ingredients must be low-cost, perform on a par with incumbents and comply with increasingly strict regulations, in addition to demonstrating renewable content and biodegradability. Thankfully consumers are also willing to pay more for ingredients that meet this brief, allowing for the possibility of profit as companies start to scale.
Sironix built its fatty acid furan platform with these challenges in mind. The strategy: to identify a manufacturable class of compounds first and then follow the performance data and expert advice to decide which markets to commercialise.
Designing scalable production lines
Fatty acid furans describe a class of compounds. Each molecule pairs a furan head group derived from the
C 5 sugars in cellulosic agricultural residue, such as corn stover or sugarcane bagasse, with a fatty acid tail from plant oil. A C-C bond
Figure 1 – Manufacturing route for the fatty acid furan platform
30 SPECIALITY CHEMICALS MAGAZINE ESTABLISHED 1981