This is a special edition of the newsletter from Everloop where we talk about how to not get lost in sustainability. 

This edition is about how to focus your energy where it matters and avoid getting distracted by “shiny” things. We invite practitioners to share their insights on how businesses can create positive impact in their organisation, sector and beyond. 

Where does sustainability show up in your area of work?

Surfactants are one of the most widely used chemical categories in the world, and most people have never heard of them. They are surface-active agents. This means they decrease the surface tension between two mediums, like oil and water, and help them interact more easily. Think soap or detergents. If you washed your hands today (and I hope you did!), you used one. They’re in shampoos, paints, and face creams, but also in mining, agriculture, semiconductor manufacturing, and basically every cleaning and personal care product on the market. 

The problem is that almost all surfactants come from petrochemicals or tropical oils, primarily palm, and increasingly coconut, all of which come with serious emissions, land-use change, and supply chain volatility. This is not a niche ingredient problem. It’s global. These unsustainable surfactants are embedded across the supply chains of the world's largest consumer goods companies. 

Of course, petrochemicals are in virtually every product we use today, and it’s well known that they are a huge source of greenhouse gas emissions. What people might not know is that the ingredients themselves can also be toxic to our water supply and soil. So our goal is to change the base chemical ingredients of modern life from something unhealthy and unsustainable to something that is both better for our planet and performs better for consumers. 

What solution have you developed?

To make our bio-surfactants,  we take a sugar source and an oil, like rapeseed oil, combine them with nutrients, and ferment them using a wild-type yeast originally found in beehives. The output is a bio-surfactant called sophorolipids, which can replace or even improve on incumbent surfactants in a wide range of applications. 

Our entire process is designed around having cost-comparability with petrochemicals. If we can’t meet them on price and beat them on performance, brands and consumers just won’t be interested. Most people want to buy sustainable products, but not if they have to spend more or compromise on efficacy. We’ve achieved that cost-performance benchmark, so now our customers are directly reducing petrochemical use without having to pay a premium.

We currently produce 1.6 kilotons of sophorlipids per year in our Liverpool plant, and we’ll be scaling to 3 kilotons by next year. Our team is incredibly lean as well; we are about 70 people, which is a bit crazy for a company producing our volumes. 

What are the main sustainability misconceptions in your area?

There’s a common misconception that simply switching from petrochemical to bio-based ingredients automatically makes a product sustainable. Tropical oils or combination ingredients of petro- and tropical still have significant, and often even worse, impacts on our planet. There’s been a move to switch from palm oil to coconut oil, but because one hectare of coconuts produces less volume than a hectare of palm, it actually makes the problem worse.  

A lot of brand energy currently goes into tracing and certifying existing supply chains, such as tracking the provenance of palm oil through long, opaque chains. That’s not wasted effort. But it’s only treating a symptom. The harder, but overall more valuable challenge, is creating ingredients that don’t carry these problems in the first place. Don’t get me wrong, our current system has gotten us to where we are, and that’s not all negative. Not at all. But it can’t continue scaling. 

There’s another misconception that bio-based products can’t match incumbents on performance. That was true for early bio-based ingredients, but that’s not true anymore. Compare the first iPhone to the iPhone today, the technology is orders of magnitude better. At Holifem, some of our big partners have seen their products improve by 30%. And consumers notice that. Reviews go up, people post about it; the product must have changed because it’s so much better. That change is us. And the price did not move. 

I think a major thing that we don't talk about enough is that petrochemicals have a very limited number of molecular building blocks. Biology has millions. We have so many problems in our world that petrochemicals just can't solve. But biology can. Bio-based technology just hasn’t had the same amount of time and investment in it as the petrochemical industry. And to be fair to the bio-based industry, petrochemicals started off as a niche. We’re trying to change major parts of global manufacturing all at once. It’s a huge task, but the upside is tremendous.  

To be clear, our products aren’t zero-emission. We use sugar and rapeseed oil, both of which come with their own emissions, like from fertiliser, pesticides, harvesting, and transport. We are actively exploring using agricultural streams instead, meaning we prevent them from going to waste. So we’re already 100% bio-based, but that’s not good enough. Circularity has to be integrated throughout the whole process.

Where do you wish the industry was focusing its energy and resources?

Speed. Speed and ambition. We have companies in our space that are ready, at scale, and able to take on the risk of helping brands transition. What we need from brands and formulators is a willingness to move faster. It takes years to develop a partnership with a big brand. And I get it, these are huge organisations. But I would love to see brands find ways to empower their innovation teams to move more quickly and lean on nimble partners who can absorb some of the uncertainty that they cannot. For me, we’re in a climate crisis. We all need to get comfortable with thinking bigger and changing much faster. 

For governments, I see the missing piece as procurement. Government procurement is a strong signal to both businesses and the public that bio-based products are affordable and effective to use. If public sector agencies committed to purchasing a certain percentage of bio-based products by a given year, it would accelerate demand, help biotech companies hit economies of scale, and ultimately make more sustainable alternatives cheaper for everyone. Naturally, there’s some more nuance in there about what is considered bio-based. I wouldn’t say it’s ok to purchase everything made of palm oil, for instance. But the sentiment holds true: government can play a much larger role in shaping the speed of growth for more sustainable industries.

What is your favourite example of a positive change / impactful action that you have recently seen in your sector?

The most significant shift I’ve seen recently is the growing recognition that petrochemicals are a supply chain risk, not just an environmental one. The geopolitical events of the last few years, culminating in what’s happening in Iran with the Strait of Hormuz,  have made visible what was always structurally true: petro supply chains depend on a small number of actors in volatile regions. It’s just not good business. 

That realisation is accelerating collaborations. Brands that were already inclined to change have been given an additional reason to act, and more companies are looking for new solutions. 

Closer to home, what gives me most energy is the trajectory of the business itself. We are breaking our own records, quarter after quarter. The technology works. The demand is there. We just need to think bigger, and I mean that literally. Whatever scale feels ambitious right now, the scale we actually need is probably ten times larger. Small goals will not move the dial on a problem this size.

What resources would you recommend for people to read or listen to learn more?

Book: What If We Get It Right? by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson 

Holiferm is a Liverpool / Manchester-based biotech company producing biosurfactants through fermentation. Find out more at holiferm.com.

Found this useful? If you are thinking about what reformulation, ingredient transparency, or supply chain resilience means for your business, we would love to talk.

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