How Sunflowers are Helping to
Improve the Dishwashing Experience
Many of us know the dishwashing dilemma: Standard liquid soaps contain harsh detergents that leave your hands dry and cracked whereas the “green” dish soaps just don’t clean as well.
What makes conventional soaps often so harsh are the surfactants, the essential cleansing agents that remove food residue, grease and grime from dishes and create foam suds. Formulators traditionally use a primary surfactant and a co-surfactant that work together to deliver the desired cleaning performance.
And now Clariant has a breakthrough product to solve the dishwashing dilemma, and it’s derived from the beautiful, strong and practical sunflower. GlucoPure® Sense is a co-surfactant that is based on 100 percent renewable, EU-sourced sunflower oil, which is helping to produce milder, gentle-on-the-skin dish detergents that clean as well as conventional products.
Changing the nature of surfactants
Under the EU’s Global Harmonised System (GHS), most dishwashing liquids are required to have an exclamation point on their label, warning that the product contains irritants or corrosives that may cause irritation or serious eye damage (H318 or H319, respectively).
Using 100 percent renewable EU-sourced sunflower oil and 100 percent renewable glucose, also sourced in Europe, Clariant has developed one of the first co-surfactants, GlucoPure Sense, to carry a no-irritant label (H318, or H319) under the GHS system.
GlucoPure Sense has a Renewable Carbon Index of 96 percent and does not contain chemicals harsh to the environment. Being almost 100 percent bio-based, it is easily biodegradable. And its skin-friendly properties allow the development of more gentle formulations, which is currently the leading factor influencing choice of hand dishwashing liquids. In blind tests, users have also reported a super nice, moisturized soft feeling left on their skin after use.
In “plate tests” in Clariant’s dishwashing laboratory, this GlucoPure Sense has shown that it can meet and even exceed the performance standards of traditional surfactants used in liquid soaps, such as betaines (Cocoamidopropyl Betaine). Its long-lasting foam in both hard and soft water is easy to rinse off. This means that outside the research lab liquid soap products can have superior cleaning power and still avoid the H318 label or go completely label-free.
And compared with the “green” surfactants leading the market today — alkyl polyglucosides (APG) — Clariant’s surfactants are proven to be nearly twice as effective, reducing the amount of product and water needed to clean dishes.
Home and personal care product makers today also are responding to regulatory pressure to find nontropical sources for raw materials. GlucoPure Sense presents a good alternative because it’s sourced entirely from the sunflower fields of Eastern and Southern Europe, as well as sugar materials based in Europe.
The beloved sunflower is helping to sow seeds of innovation in the detergents industry. Today, consumers don’t need to compromise: They can have products that are renewable, clean effectively and feel great on the hands.
