Page 130 - CW E-Magazine (2-7-2024)

Point of View

Market drivers
While increasing demand for ‘green’ cleaning, coupled with a favourable regulatory outlook in developed countries, is driving the global
MBS market, their higher costs compared to the plant-derived and synthetic counterparts are a hurdle to faster adoption. Though MBS are
typically 8-10 times as expensive as their chemical counterparts, bear in mind that they are currently produced at a much smaller scale, and
as the markets expand – driven by regulation and consumer preference – their scale of manufacture will rise and their production economics
improve.

Key factors affecting the efficiency of MBS production arecost of substrates&purification; problems in upscaling; and higher cost of down-
stream processing. Yields of the biotech processes for their manufacture have now been optimised to a fair extent, and this is not a problem
in itself. The issues instead relate to finding a balance between yield, performance and cost. Efforts to achieve improvement in manufacturing
economics focus on, amongst others, development and use of overproducing mutant or recombinant strains for enhanced yields; use of cheap
or waste substrates, such as agro-based industrial wastes, to lower the initial raw material costs involved in the process; and development
of efficient bioprocesses, including optimisation of culture conditions and cost-effective separation processes to maximize recovery.
While initial production methods of MBS offered limited variation originating from the limitations on micro-organisms – same
products were obtained even if different feedstocks are used – that has changed. Metabolic engineering of production organisms offers wide
opportunities for extending accessible structures and consequently properties.

Applications
MBS can be used as emulsifiers, de-emulsifiers, wetting agents, spreading agents, foaming agents, functional food ingredients and
detergents. Industrial sectors in which they can find use include petroleum & petrochemicals, organic chemicals, food & beverage, cosmetics &
pharmaceuticals, mining & metallurgy, agrochemicals & fertilizers, environmental control & management, etc. MBS are another tool in the
sustainability transition of end-use companies that are today mainly from the home and personal care industries.

Importantly, their performance in specific applications is often better, which means they can be incorporated into formulations at lower
levels.

Market trends
For some decades oleochemicals have been the preferred‘greener’ surfactants, but they are still produced entirely by chemical synthesis
and only the hydrophobic part (usually) comes from renewable feedstocks.

As a category biosurfactants (including methyl esters ketones, APGs, sorbitan and sucrose esters, as well as MBS, account for about
5% of the overall market for surfactants (petrochemical and oleochemical based surfactants almost equally account for the balance).
The share of the second-generation MBS is still small – under 1% – with sophorolipids accounting for about half of this market, followed by
rhamnolipids with about a quarter.

The reason for the low share is simple – MBS are still about 10 times costlier than their chemical counterparts. But, as mentioned earlier,
industrial-scale production has emerged only recently.

In June this year, Evonik, the Germany headquartered speciality chemicals company,inaugurated its new biosurfactant plant in Slovakia.
The ‘triple-digit million-euro’ facility is said to be the first worldwide to manufacture industrial-scale quantities of rhamnolipids, via an
IP-protected biotechnological process.

In India, Godrej Industries has taken the lead and launched a range of sophorolipids, that act as surfactant, emulsifier, preservative and
detergent – albeit at small scale. As a preservative, for example, it could potentially replace parabens – a dirty word in much of the developed
world – and other commonly used chemical preservatives in formulations. Its performance has been evaluated in toothpaste, soaps &
detergents and found to be excellent, while in colour cosmetics, they enable high pigment loading and colour spread in applications like
lipsticks, eyeliners, mascaras and foundation bases. They can even be used as a food emulsifier, due to their non-toxic nature. The product
is yet to find much traction amongst customers here, but that will change, if ever so slowly!

As the market size for biosurfactants in general, and MBS, in particular, expands, and manufacturing capacity gets created at scale, costs
will decline, hopefully setting in motion a virtuous cycle of growth.
Ravi Raghavan

130 Chemical Weekly July 2, 2024

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