Benefits

RENEWABLE • BIODEGRADABLE • SAFE • FLEXIBLE • SCALABLE

Made with cellulose, the most abundant biomaterial on the planet.

From the beginning, we knew that using cellulose from sustainably managed forests would be the best starting point for a new surfactant .

Cellulose is an organic material created by plants to support their structure. It’s generally what makes up most of the material in land-based plants. And because of that, countless species have evolved to eat it. From bacteria to elephants, there are trillions of living organisms on Earth that are able to turn Spherelose® into food for the next generation of plants.

But it’s not just being renewable and biodegradable that makes Spherelose® special – it’s safe, globally scalable, and above all adaptable to all kinds of surfactant applications.

Renewable

The most sustainable way to make Spherelose® is to use residual wood grown in sustainably managed forests.

Residual wood is the wood that’s not good enough to be used in the timber industry – the soft, top part of the tree or the round parts from the outside of the trunk.

Residual wood is already processed into wood pulp, which is turned into sustainable paper and packaging.

To make Spherelose®, we turn the pulp into tiny cellulose particles, then add a very thin layer of plant oil to only one side of each particle. The plant oil is extracted by squeezing it out of plants like sunflowers, canola, olives – and many others.

Scalable

The biggest challenge with finding renewable surfactant technologies is the scale – annual global demand is around 17 million metric tonnes.

By making Spherelose® from wood pulp, we can leverage an enormous, pre-existing supply chain that spans the globe and produces about 190 million metric tonnes of wood pulp per year.

Spherelose® could meet a quarter of the world’s entire surfactant demand using just a few percent of the world’s pulp production.

And the flexibility to use many different plant oils (and only a small amount of them) means that regardless of whether the climate zone is temperate, boreal, tropical, Mediterranean on sub-tropical, the raw materials for Spherelose® can be grown at scale.

Customisable

The key feature of surfactants is that they let water and oily substances mix together. Different applications have different effective ratios of water and oil (known as the hydrophilicity-lipophilicity balance, or HLB), and so traditionally they’ve needed different surfactants made with different chemicals and different processes.

Spherelose® is a true platform technology which can produce a wide range of surfactants with different properties, simply by changing manufacturing parameters like time and temperature.

This means Spherelose® could be made for

  • oil-in-water and water-in-oil emulsifiers
  • solubilisers
  • detergents
  • wetting agents.

Biodegradable

The processes that turn wood pulp and plant oil into Spherelose® create chemical bonds that are easily broken apart by microorganisms both on land and in water. They convert Spherelose® into food for themselves, and ultimately they become food for the animals that depend on them.

There are no dangerous chemical components in Spherelose® either – just carbon, oxygen and hydrogen, the building blocks of life. When Spherelose® breaks down, its constituents re-enter the carbon cycle and ultimately help grow new plants.

When  independently tested to ISO 14855-1, Spherelose® achieved 93% biodegradation in 180 days.

Safe

Spherelose® is made up of tiny cellulose particles, thousands of times larger than the molecules used in other surfactants.

Because the particles are so much larger, Spherelose® is less likely to penetrate into the outer skin layers.

Spherelose® has been independently tested and is approved as Non-irritating/Safe for sensitive skin.

Marketable

The ability to make Spherelose® with a huge variety of different plant oils gives brands the opportunity to formulate unique products that appeal to their most ardent customers.

Complete product lines could be created based on the use of Spherelose® with one particular plant oil

  • capture the essence of an endless summer with Spherelose made from sunflower oil
  • distil millennia of history with Spherelose® made from olive oil,
  • invoke the essence of sustainability with Spherelose® made from hemp oil
  • use argan, rice bran, coconut, flax or betelnut to reference the spirit of exotic locations.