Sustainable Detergents - One Standard For Europe

A brand new standard has been developed by Europe’s leading producers of sustainable detergents, called the Greenway Standard.

Sustainable detergents - one standard for all: A brand new standard has been developed by Europe’s leading producers of sustainable detergents, called the Greenway Standard. The focus is on economical, ecological and social issues, all at the same time. This is a significant challenge, explains Peter Malaise, consultant on sustainable development issues, writing exclusively for ECJ.

Aren’t all detergents sustainable? Unfortunately not – but as a matter of fact it depends on what your definition of ‘sustainable’ is. ‘Sustainable’ is not the same as ‘biodegradable’; and only the smaller part of most detergent formulations - the surfactants - must legally be biodegradable. Surfactants make up between three and 20 per cent of a detergent formula, depending on the type of product, leaving between 80 and 97 per cent unaccounted for.

Besides, the fact that part of a detergent is biodegradable doesn’t say anything about its aquatic toxicity, or about the stable metabolites it might generate. Nor does it make clear if the carbon based raw materials used were from fossil or from renewable sources and if the transformation technology used ‘green’ chemistry principles and was keen on energy and waste. Uhhh...?

Yes, the detergent business is all too often clear as mud. Detergents are a very complex type of commodity, which we use on a daily basis - mostly without much thought or afterthought - and about which we don’t know too much, even when we’re professional users. It is the obvious tool which does the dirty job and that’s it.

It was in the early 1960s that detergents first came under official scrutiny. For a good reason: the foam they generated built up in and around the river and canal locks, hampered ship traffic and even caused people to die by suffocation or drowning. In the wake of those events came Europe-wide legislation on the biodegradability of their main components, the surfactants. These ‘surface active’ ingredients are the workhorses of detergents, they lower the surface tension and dramatically improve the water’s own cleaning effect.

Impact of surfactants

Unfortunately surfactants also dramatically increase the impacts of detergents on our natural environment and our health. The compulsory biodegradability made the problem disappear visually (no foam anymore), and the waste water purification plants that spread over Europe some decades ago reduced the global impact of detergents to some extent. But the substantial growth in the use of detergents overruled this by far.

Today there is hardly any market segment that does not use them for one application or another. Pesticides and insecticides contain them for better spreading and penetration of the plant substance; in medicine, they improve the quick absorption into our system - just as a few examples.

Ingredients unavailable

From the 1980s onwards, in the wake of alternatives for chemical agriculture, food additives, cosmetics and the like, the first offers for another type of detergents came into the market. It was a difficult start: the conventional detergents had continued to walk down performance lane and were often complete overkill, whereas their (mainly unregulated) environmental and health impact was rocketing.

Sustainable ingredients were rarely available and when they were they were not able to generate an efficiency comparable to the heavyweight, but unsustainable chemistry of the conventional products. It took more than 20 years before sustainable detergent producers had a reasonable choice of ingredients that were sustainable as well as satisfactory in terms of performance.

In 1993 the EU set up an ecolabel initiative for detergents. Until 2003 it was hardly noticed and there were next to no products aiming for it, as many of the leading organisations in the sustainability realm judged the criteria too weak and too permissive. As a matter of fact the main aim of the EU label was – in its own words – to certify detergents “that were less of a burden to the environment” and secondly, to have as many of them as possible. In that perspective the requirements for such a label should not be too explicit.

Several certification organisations for organic produce – amongst them ICEA in Italy, the Soil Association in the UK and Ecocert in France – each proposed their own, stricter standard.  The difficulty was, and continues to be, the technical and environmental complexity of detergents and the insight that is needed to create a sustainable and efficient alternative. It’s not because you can develop an excellent set of certification criteria for organic produce that you can deliver something similar for detergents (and the other way round, of course).

Most producers of sustainable detergents – the ones that mainly or exclusively produce sustainable alternatives, that is - were dissatisfied with each and every label or certification around: none of them encompassed the full set of values they were operating with.

Concept drafted

In the winter of 2011 French, Italian and Belgian producers who had previously met privately started talking to each other and to some external experts. The outline of a mutual concept was drafted and the development began. In the winter of 2012 a non-profit association was created: The Greenway to Life, with a registered office in Paris and a technical office in Pianiga, Italy. In February 2013 the new Greenway Standard was presented during a press conference at the Biofach in Nürnberg, the worldwide most important organic fair.

The foundations of the Greenway Standard are the principles of sustainable development. That means a focus on economical, ecological and social issues at the same time, which is quite a challenge.

For the practical implementation two tools have been created:

• A standard in text format of about 60 pages, which describes in detail all the requirements to which a candidate detergent has to respond and the ethical, ecological, social or technical motivation behind the requirements. This standard gives full detail of test protocols and the thresholds to be respected, the standard product formulae to test against and the classifications that can be obtained. There is also a marked attention for terminology in the communication

• An online calculation module accessible for members through a VPN connection. The module consists of a huge detergent ingredients database with an evaluation and classification of each ingredient. All chemical, biochemical, biological and safety data which are available today are taken in account and are used in the calculation by the database engine. Any formula can be introduced and immediately evaluated on its eligibility for labelling. When a negative outcome occurs, the applicant gets indications about the underlying reasons.

Before engaging in a certification trajectory the applicant can himself check, correct and fine-tune whatever issue that might come up. Besides this evaluation process he needs to introduce data from an external lab on the aquatic toxicity and the performance of the submitted formula.

Once he gets a ‘yes’ from the calculation module, the dedicated external experts of Greenway recheck the submitted formula on its overall conformity with the Greenway Standard. When they agree, the applicant can indicate an external auditor of his choice to run an audit, both theoretical and in his premises. After a positive outcome, the Greenway label will be granted to the detergent.

It’s important to stress that all criteria are based on open, scientifically sound standards and all testing on similarly open protocols, such as used by the scientific community worldwide and by most detergent producers. That guarantees the highest level of compliance with market standards, a criticism which is often uttered against ‘green’ labelling

Differences and merits

There are many ecolabels from a variety of sources on the market today, a quick internet search can easily feature up to 400 ‘green’ or supposedly ‘green’ labels. Nevertheless the Greenway Standard can make a difference:

• The Greenway non-profit association is the first multi-stakeholder initiative on sustainable detergents where producers, experts, and representatives from distributors and professional and private consumers will cooperate

• As an independent civil initiative, Greenway is not tainted by political or commercial influences and its members are estimated by many NGO’s

• Sustainable development is one pillar of the label, not an add-on, and an inextricable part of the global approach

• Product performance is the other pillar of the label and safeguards that labelled products are not just ‘green’, but also efficient detergents

• The product criteria were set up by professionals from the international sustainable detergent market segment, producers and experts alike

• The Greenway Standard is complying with actual scientific and technical knowledge and will be constantly updated by the dedicated experts

• The audits are done by qualified certification bodies, independent of Greenway.

There has been a very positive reaction from several certification bodies throughout Europe: they acclaim the high technical quality and the professionalism of the criteria, as well as the care for transparency and objectivity in the approach.

Further developments are to be expected soon and can be followed here.

Magnetic Soap Could Revolutionise Cleaning

A droplet containing the soap is attracted to the magnet at left.

Magnetic soap could help in oil spill clean-ups: An international team of scientists has demonstrated the first soap that responds to magnets. This means the soap and the materials that it dissolves can be removed easily by applying a magnetic field. Experts say that with further development, it could find applications in cleaning up oil spills and waste water.

Details of the new soap, which contains iron atoms, are reported in the chemistry journal Angewandte Chemie. It is similar to ordinary soap, but the atoms of iron help form tiny particles that are easily removed magnetically. "If you'd have said about 10 years ago to a chemist: 'Let's have some soap that responds to magnets', they'd have looked at you with a very blank face," said co-author Julian Eastoe of the University of Bristol. He told BBC News: "We were interested to see, if you went back to the chemical drawing board with the tool-kit of modern synthetic chemistry, if you could...design one."

Soap is made of long molecules with ends that behave differently: One end of the molecule is attracted to water and the other is repelled by it. The "detergent" action of soap comes from its ability to attach to oily, grimy surfaces, with the "water-hating" end breaking up molecules at that surface. The soap molecules then gather up into droplets in which all the "water-loving" ends face outward. Prof Eastoe and his team started with detergent molecules that he said were "very similar to what you'd find in your kitchen or bathroom" - one of which can be found in mouthwash. The team found a way to simply add iron atoms into the molecules. The droplets that the soap formed were attracted to a magnet, just as iron filings would be.

The soap could make for a far easier means of gathering oil from spills.

But single iron atoms would not behave as tiny individual magnets, so some other process had to be at work. To get a look at what was going on in the chemical process required a view at the molecular level. So the team sent their samples to the Institute Laue Langevin (ILL) in Grenoble, France, where an intense beam of the sub-atomic particles known as neutrons shed light on the matter. They saw that the iron particles were clumping neatly together into iron nanoparticles, tiny clumps of iron that could in fact respond to a magnetic field.

Prof Eastoe said the research was still at the laboratory stages but was already the subject of discussion. "The research at the University of Bristol in this field is about how we can take the ordinary and give it extraordinary properties by chemical design," he said. "We have uncovered the principle by which you can generate this kind of material and now it's back to the drawing board to make it better."

Scientists Produce World's First Magnetic Soap: Scientists from Bristol University have developed a soap, composed of iron rich salts dissolved in water, that responds to a magnetic field when placed in solution. The soap’s magnetic properties were shown with neutrons at the Institut Laue-Langevin to result from tiny iron-rich clumps that sit within the watery solution. The generation of this property in a fully functional soap could calm concerns over the use of soaps in oil-spill clean ups and revolutionise industrial cleaning products.

Scientists have long been searching for a way to control soaps (or surfactants as they are known in industry) once they are in solution to increase their ability to dissolve oils in water and then remove them from a system. The team at Bristol University have previously worked on soaps sensitive to light, carbon dioxide or changes in pH, temperature or pressure. Their latest breakthrough, reported in Angewandte Chemie, is the world’s first soap sensitive to a magnetic field.

Ionic liquid surfactants, composed mostly of water with some transition metal complexes (heavy metals like iron bound to halides such as bromine or chlorine) have been suggested as potentially controllable by magnets for some time, but it had always been assumed that their metallic centres were too isolated within the solution, preventing the long-range interactions required to be magnetically active.

The team at Bristol, lead by Professor Julian Eastoe produced their magnetic soap by dissolving iron in a range of inert surfactant materials composed of chloride and bromide ions, very similar to those found in everyday mouthwash or fabric conditioner. The addition of the iron creates metallic centres within the soap particles.

To test its properties, the team introduced a magnet to a test tube containing their new soap lying beneath a less dense organic solution. When the magnet was introduced the iron-rich soap overcame both gravity and surface tension between the water and oil, to levitate through the organic solvent and reach the source of the magnetic energy, proving its magnetic properties.

Once the surfactant was developed and shown to be magnetic, Prof Eastoe’s team took it to the Institut Laue-Langevin, the world’s flagship centre for neutron science, and home to the world’s most intense neutron source, to investigate the science behind its remarkable property.

When surfactants are added to water they are known to form tiny clumps (particles called micelles). Scientists at ILL used a technique called “small angle neutron scattering (SANS)” to confirm that it was this clumping of the iron-rich surfactant that brought about its magnetic properties.

Dr Isabelle Grillo, responsible of the Chemistry Laboratories at ILL: “The particles of surfactant in solution are small and thus difficult to see using light but are easily revealed by SANS which we use to investigate the structure and behaviour of all types of materials with typical sizes ranging from the nanometer to the tenth of micrometer.”

Up, up and away: This photo shows the magnetic soap rising up through the test tube.

The potential applications of magnetic surfactants are huge. Their responsiveness to external stimuli allows a range of properties, such as their electrical conductivity, melting point, the size and shape of aggregates and how readily its dissolves in water to be altered by a simple magnetic on and off switch. Traditionally these factors, which are key to the effective application of soaps in a variety of industrial settings, could only be controlled by adding an electric charge or changing the pH, temperature or pressure of the system, all changes that irreversibly alter the system composition and cost money to remediate.

Its magnetic properties also makes it easier to round up and remove from a system once it has been added, suggesting further applications in environmental clean ups and water treatment. Scientific experiments which require precise control of liquid droplets could also be made easier with the addition of this surfactant and a magnetic field.

Professor Julian Eastoe, University of Bristol: “As most magnets are metals, from a purely scientific point of view these ionic liquid surfactants are highly unusual, making them a particularly interesting discovery. From a commercial point of view, though these exact liquids aren’t yet ready to appear in any household product, by proving that magnetic soaps can be developed, future work can reproduce the same phenomenon in more commercially viable liquids for a range of applications from water treatment to industrial cleaning products.”

Peter Dowding an industrial chemist, not involved in the research: “Any systems which act only when responding to an outside stimulus that has no effect on its composition is a major breakthrough as you can create products which only work when they are needed to. Also the ability to remove the surfactant after it has been added widens the potential applications to environmentally sensitive areas like oil spill clean ups where in the past concerns have been raised.”

Is this the future of cleaning? New Window Cleaning Soap?

Ecover has developed the world's first ‘eco surfactant' - the beating heart of a cleaning product - that it claims is 'more ecological and powerful' than their old formulations... The mantra of 'green' cleaning has always been to use plant-based and mineral products instead of petrochemical ones.
As well as cutting down on harmful chemicals in our homes, 'eco' products cut down on chemicals in our water systems that can be highly toxic to fish, frogs and other aquatic animals. That said, even plant-based formulations have an environmental impact. They require water to neutralise their impact on the water supply, energy for the manufacturing process and transport for their raw ingredients. In other words, there is always room for improvement in the world of green cleaning.

Last month Ecover took an important step in the right direction. The company announced it had succeeded in developing the world's first 'eco surfactant' using an energy-efficient and entirely biochemical procedure powered by yeast - similar to the process of brewing beer. But first, a word on surfactants Surfactants are the active ingredient in the majority of household cleaners. They can be produced from either petrochemical substances or plant-based alternatives. The first benefit of plant-based alternatives is biodegradability. Petrochemical surfactants do not biodegrade completely and so leave behind particles that accumulate in watercourses. They may also be absorbed into soil, in both cases increasing the risk of environmental damage and hindering the use of sewage sludge as an organic fertiliser.

Dirk Develter, research and development manager at Ecover describes it as similar to the rubbish left in space from space missions - the rockets break up and just leave the bits floating around. Plant-based surfactants on the other hand biodegrade quickly and completely, leaving behind no traces in the environment. The second benefit of using plant-based over petrochemical surfactants is that they are from renewable sources rather than from petrochemicals which rely upon fossil resources. Ecover has always used plant-based alternatives for the bulk of their ingredients. However, until now, plant-based surfactants have been manufactured using the same energy intensive process as petrochemical ones.

After seven years of research Ecover's scientists have invented a new energy efficient process to produce surfactants naturally. Their new surfactant is produced from a ‘sophorolipid' - completely natural compounds created through the action of yeast. The idea of this is nothing new - in the 1960s scientists discovered yeast in a bumblebee nest that had the unique characteristic of creating a kind of surfactant from a combination of glucose (sugar) and oil (a fatty acid) - but the application of it on this scale certainly is. At first, Ecover scientists started production in a test-tube. Now they use a special 10,000 litre ‘bioreactor' in Slovakia, a machine which provides the perfect breeding ground for yeast cells. This in turn enables them to harness yeast's unique ability to combine water-soluble sugars and non-soluble oils to produce the new surfactant.

Develter says the company's new range of products containing its eco surfactant are 'more ecological' than their old formulations for the following reasons:
• They are made using natural, readily available, sustainable raw ingredients - vegetable oil, yeast and sugar.
• The raw ingredients are sourced in Europe, whereas previous plant-based surfactants had to be sourced from Asia so they require less transport miles.
• The energy required in the production process is even lower than before
• The products have full biodegradability and lower aquatic toxicity than before.

The new formulations are kinder to human skin too. As well as only containing plant-based ingredients and fragrances, the range is pH neutral - so no rubber gloves necessary. What about performance? ‘Our new formulations are much more powerful our old formulations,' says Develter. Tests conducted by Ecover and an independent body for the hard surface cleaning range showed that the range outperformed most, if not all brands in effectiveness, and all scored highly in areas such as ease of use, fragrance and drying time.

So what are the downsides? According to Develter, whilst eco surfactants are suited as low-foaming surfactants in hard surface cleaning and automatic dishwashers, they are not suitable for high foaming applications such as manual dishwashing. Experiments with solubility, foaming powder and stability are, however, in full swing so that the eco surfactants can be used in laundry and dishwashing detergents.

What's the catch?
One issue for Ecover is price. The eco surfactants are almost ten times more expensive than the cheapest petrochemical-based surfactants around. ‘Yet because of their superior performance this difference is largely levelled out' says Develter. However, in the long term the company hopes to use and produce larger amounts at a cheaper price. At the moment Ecover can only make enough to cover their own brand's needs and they have patented production. 'We are at the beginning of a long journey with this and in the future if others see eco surfactants working they may be interested too,' says Develter. 'This may allow us to work with others and up-scale production to another level.' There may be no such thing as a 100 per cent ecological cleaning product, but Ecover's eco surfactants are an important step in the right direction. The surfactant bar has been raised - are the cleaning giants nimble enough to follow?


• Ecover Window & Glass Cleaner - RRP £2.69 (500ml) - this brand new product can be used on windows, mirrors, glass and chrome. Up against Mr Muscle Window Cleaner, it took victory on performance and finish, and was described as ‘efficient', ‘very effective' and ‘easy to use' in consumer research.
What's more, because Ecover only uses sustainable plant-based and mineral ingredients, you don't have to worry about leaving behind residues of nasty (and unnecessary) chemicals when you clean. And thanks to its pH neutral formula, it won't irritate skin like some other products can - so feel free to forget the rubber gloves. I've heard the dish-washing soap is also great for cleaning windows.