The right ingredients

Manufacturers of cleaning products in the household, industrial and institutional (HI&I) industries continue to look for alternative ingredients in an effort to comply with ever more vigorous environmental, health and safety (EHS) regulations. These manufacturers must meet these increasingly challenging regulatory demands without compromising performance and limit the use of materials with unfavourable environmental profiles. Finding suitable alternatives with a sustainable footprint that exhibit high-performance characteristics customers demand, however, is no easy feat and has been the basis of industry-wide research and development efforts.

Today, end users, manufacturers and ingredient suppliers in the cleaning products industry are faced with four primary challenges: increasing worker safety; creating greener ingredients; reaching business objectives; and being more innovative.

Worker safety

Voices within and outside the industry are clamouring for change when it comes to finding alternative ingredients that are safer to use than incumbents and that are more effective than existing options. Many cleaning products use high pH (alkalinity) and high temperatures that require users to take precautions to ensure safe use. Alternatives that would be effective at neutral pH or lower temperatures would provide workers benefits in both safety and ease of use.

Greener ingredients

For manufacturers of cleaning products and those who supply ingredients, industry trends provide a positive outlook for sustainable products. While only a minority of consumers are willing to pay a "green premium", evidence continues to build that consumers are increasingly considering the environmental footprint of the products they buy. Statista reported that consumers’ willingness to pay a price for sustainability has increased from 32% to 40% between 2011 and 2014, and nearly 60% of consumers consider the sustainable nature of a product before making a buying decision.

Business objectives

A key issue for cleaning products and ingredient suppliers is how to meet the needs of a growing number of shoppers who choose products for sustainability and performance. Consumer goods industry leaders, such as Procter and Gamble, Tesco, Unilever and Walmart, have taken ambitious and innovative steps to encourage their suppliers to offer more sustainable ingredients and products. For example, Procter and Gamble has committed to a 2020 goal of replacing 25% of petroleum-based raw materials with sustainably sourced renewable materials in its products.

Innovation

An increasing number of ingredient suppliers have turned to bio-renewable feedstocks as the basis for developing sustainable and regulation-compliant alternatives that perform better than conventional ingredients, which are primarily derived from scarce petrochemical sources.

Two ingredients are now available to cleaning product manufacturers to enable formulators to overcome these hurdles and, ultimately, to provide consumers with performance they expect in products with impressive environmental and safety profiles and that are affordable.

Elevance, a specialty chemical company developing a range of cleaning ingredients to bridge the gap between performance and sustainability, released Elevance Clean 1200 to the European cleaning industry in March 2015. The new cleaning ingredient boosts the cleaning performance by rapidly penetrating challenging soils. It is bio-based, used at neutral pH, VOC-exempt and highly compatible across a range of products. Elevance Clean 1200 has demonstrated superior performance over other bio-based and traditional cleaning ingredients in the market in applications including industrial manufacturing, parts cleaning, transportation, oil and gas, metal cleaning, food processing, and textiles to remove greases and soils faster and more effectively.  

Also recently introduced is STEPOSOL MET-10U, an ingredient from Stepan Company, one of the leading global surfactant manufacturers. STEPOSOL MET-10U is an extremely versatile, surface active and low HLB non-ionic surfactant that works at low concentrations. It is a powerful sustainable surfactant delivering impressive cleaning performance with the ability to replace ingredients in a broad range of applications, including adhesive removal, paint and coating removal systems, kitchen degreasers and all-purpose cleaners for both consumer and industrial uses.

Newly introduced alternatives are now available, enabling manufacturers and consumers to meet growing customer demands and achieve their goals of finding products that offer a favorable environmental profile together with superior performance.