Considerations on the biosurfactants realities: let’s call a spade a spade

History is one of my hobbies, the other one is colloid chemistry in general and surface active agents in particular, so those two subjects occasionally cross path in my mind. And in my recent thoughts, among others, came the observation that while the today so unpopular petrochemical (conventional) surfactants took less of a generation to become widely established, biosurfactants are still struggling  since their early discovery over two generations ago. I admit, it is a rather trivial observation, but it elicits a less trivial question: why?

My answer is dismayingly simple: Biosurfactants DO NOT DO ANYTHING THAT CONVENTIONAL SURFACTANTS DO NOT DO.

Yes biosurfactants are easily biodegradable, but most  conventional surfactants biodegrade at rates such that they are not harmful to the environment.
Yes biosurfactants are mild, but there are mild conventional surfactants.
Yes biosurfactants are sustainable, but so are the bio-based conventional surfactants.
Yes biosurfactants have antimicrobial effects, but so do, for example, the conventional quats.
Yes biosurfactants are stable in harsh environments, but these are rarely met in real-in-use conditions, the most notable one being enhanced oil recovery, for which there are some reported  large scale trials underway in China.

The reality is that biosurfactants do not offer step changes (contrary to what the petrochemical surfactants did), just incremental improvements and  in the market dynamics incremental improvements translate in commercial success only if:

• the improvement brought about  can be perceived by the end-users
  and if yes:
• it presents  in a demonstrable cost/effectiveness advantage.

But much of the benefits of biosurfactants portrayed by their manufacturers are vague, often immaterial, subjective, and difficult to quantify, much  like the debatable “Goodwill” in certain balance sheets.
A  reproach that can be made to the producers of biosurfactants is that they have presented their products for what they are rather than for what they do or could do. As such for many years biosurfactants  have vegetated in the barren limbo of the “products looking for applications”, that rarely yields quick commercial success, rather than prospering in the fertile soil of the “the remedy for unresolved problems”. As an example certain sophorolipids are described as “low foaming”, which has an appeal on its own, but lower than if it said, for example, that in consequence “they  might be considered as an alternative to hardly biodegradable low foaming petrochemical surfactants”. Simply limiting at portraying  features leaves to the creativity of the potential user the translation of such features into useful effect, which is not guaranteed to always work. And surely not quickly.

It is pedantically repeated that the cost of biosurfactant is the obstacle to  their widespread use . This is only part of the truth: the limited availability prevented on one side to explore potential application with extensive in-use testing and on the other side  was an obstacle in the  scale-up of volume-demanding commercial realisations in the instances  when cost-effectiveness was identified.  If the volume demanded to formulate a night cream sold in a few countries can be  accommodated with the existing production volumes, it  cannot support , for example, a hair shampoo for the global market . The Evonik’s 20 kilotons per year of capacity recently bought on stream are a drop in the ocean of the 15 million tons per year or so of consumed conventional surfactants.

Associated with the volume availability is the security of supply of consistent quality ingredients: mass consumer brands cannot rely on one single production site. And last, but not least, there must be a multiplicity of suppliers, to guarantee a permanent competitive environment and prevent the establishment of monopolistic situations.

Only when acceptable price and availability are met biosurfactants could become a large scale  commercial alternative to conventional sulphonates, sulphates, ethoxylates, of course assuming that they can perform technically.

There is a conundrum here: the biosurfactant producers must have a guarantee of return on investments before raising capacity, the formulators need guarantee of supply at realistic costs before using them in large scale  brands. At some point something must  happen, lest  the deadlock   go on forever.

There is any reason to believe that cost reduction is an ongoing objective for  biosurfactants producers, their future depends on it, and it is a certitude that there have been and there are constant incremental improvements resulting from the accumulated know-how. In certain instances cost-effectiveness must have been achieved, as biosurfactants begins to be formulated  in mass consumer products and not only in limited volume, top of the range cosmetics, that can accommodate high cost ingredients to bombast difficult-to-quantify effects. Quite frankly in many instances these seem to be just a marketing gimmick.