Looking to establish a more sustainable and diversified supply chain of feedstocks for its consumer goods, Unilever is partnering with Nufarm to develop a potential new source of sustainable oils to produce household cleaning products.
Using a variety of sugarcane developed by Nufarm known as energy cane, the partners will take advantage of recent breakthroughs in biotechnology to develop a new commercially viable variety of energy cane to produce biomass oil. The increased biomass from the enhanced energy cane will be used for the extraction of sustainable oil, providing the fatty acids which are the base ingredient in the production of Unilever’s laundry detergents, beauty and personal care products. Energy cane, a sustainable crop, currently generates significantly more plant matter and sugar than traditional sugar cane.
It would be the first time a biomass crop has been optimised to produce the plant-based oil which, if successfully grown at scale, will be used as an ingredient in consumer goods products.
Unilever said that raw materials and ingredients account for some 52% of its GHG emissions and the partnership is one way in which it is using biotechnology to advance the sustainable sourcing of its critical raw materials.
“This partnership enables us to identify alternative ingredients for our household, beauty and personal care brands, which will further support our ambition to reach net-zero emissions across our value chain,” said Neil Parry, Head of Biotechnology at Unilever.
Typically, oils are derived from the seeds and fruits of plants like sunflowers and canola. The energy cane allows oils to be derived from the whole plant including the leaves. The intention is not to waste any part of the crop with the sugar potentially being used in other biotechnology processes to create ingredients such as fragrances and enzymes. Using left over plant fibre to produce packaging will also being investigated.
Greg Hunt, Nufarm CEO said: “This technology and associated know-how further enhance Nufarm’s novel, sustainable and scalable oils strategy in high biomass crops like energy cane and forage sorghum and provides new transformational oils platform potential.”
Nufarm added that energy cane, in its current form, has already shown sustainability benefits such as climate stress tolerance, drought resistance, more efficient protection of soil against erosion and harvesting benefits for farmers.
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