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Each decade has its own set of well-loved, overused, business buzzwords. The 80’s gave us ‘low-hanging fruit’ and ‘bottom-line’, the 90’s ‘streamline’ and ‘leverage’, whilst the 2000’s gave us ‘synergy’.

One of this decade’s top buzzwords is ‘sustainability’. But unlike most buzzwords, the word ‘sustainability’ is overused with good reason. That being that we live in a world with diminishing natural resources, and a growing population.

As a result, the UN is reporting that, “2016 is slated to be hottest year ever, with record-breaking emissions and melting Arctic ice.” While the WWF states that, “A new economic path towards sustainability is both a necessity and a huge opportunity.”

It is this necessity and opportunity that is directing the chemical industry’s thinking.

Take for example, the fact that the chemical company Henkel, includes sustainability as one of four main criteria for supplier selection (the others being price, on-time delivery and product quality). Given that Henkel is a very successful company, with 50,000 employees, and an €18 billion turnover, which operates brands such as Persil, Fa, Schwarzkopf, Pritt, Locktite and Dial, then other chemical companies would do well to follow their lead.

In fact, given the number of suppliers Henkel cooperates with, chemical traders or manufacturers need to source their feedstock wisely if they wish to do any business at all.

This is a point that Christine Schneider, Head of Global Sustainability in Research and Development in Laundry and Home Care at Henkel, made clear in her presentation at CIEX Europe 2016, a unique platform created for R&D and innovation experts from the consumer, industrial and specialty chemical sectors.

You can watch her presentation and others like it, from the CIEX Europe conference on YouTube here.

Here she opened up about some of the challenges chemical companies face in improving sustainability, and talked about the processes Henkel had in place to achieve their targets.

Sustainability Targets

Indeed, one of the first steps to success in sustainability is establishing targets, with Henkel setting out in 2010 with a simple goal to triple sustainability over the next 20 years. They aim to achieve this by increasing sales by 50% in that time, while halving the footprint of raw chemical material sourcing.

The second step a chemical company needs to take is analysis; the need to study a product’s environmental impact. This should take into account all the stages of its life, including the resources used during the product’s (even domestic) consumption. Schneider gave the example of washing detergent, and explained how much of this product’s impact was in packaging or in heating the washing water. As a result, a ‘life cycle assessment’ of detergent showed the phase that causes the biggest carbon footprint was ‘usage’, which creates 81% of a detergent’s ‘ungreenliness’.

As is evident in the graph, much of the challenge in making many domestic products more sustainable is that the largest carbon footprint process is out of the manufacturer’s control. If Henkel could persuade its customers to wash their laundry at 30°, instead of 40°, then the brand Persil would reduce CO² emissions by 500,000 tons a year.

But by analysing the data, any efforts to make Persil a more sustainable product can now focus on the heart of the problem. Without analysis, any sustainability drive may focus on the wrong goal, and any success would be immeasurable

The third step towards sustainable chemical products was traceability. This was achieved by tracking where a raw material originated from, how it was sourced, how it was transported and refined, and knowing who was involved in each process. This traceability includes following the route that waste products take, as well as what happens to chemical products after they have been used and are at the end of their lives.

To do this, Henkel recommends working closely with suppliers, building long-term understandings, and sharing information about sourcing and sustainability issues. Co-operating with NGO’s, such as WWF and Greenpeace, also allows companies access to advice and helps with the sharing of ideas and efforts towards a mutual goal. This not only allows for ‘sustainability credentials’ to be openly verified, but also saves money, as the company can adopt a ‘one audit’ process, that is used by both chemical supplier and manufacturer to confirm the sustainability of feedstock.

Schneider also stated that, “Another very good initiative is [that we] reward our suppliers; one example being Novozyme, who won Henkel’s ‘Best Sustainability Award in Laundry and Home Care’. [They won] for their work in producing a better enzyme mix, with more high performing enzymes which could reduce the surfactant content, which is a driver when it comes to counting carbon footprint.”

The issuing of awards was also part of a concerted effort to establish a public commitment towards sustainability. This acts not only to promote the company’s efforts in a positive light, but also makes the public aware of the issues at hand. This could lower wastage, help recycle packaging, lower wash temperatures etc, as well as help guide the company towards its goals, as sustainability becomes a public and declared intent.

This is why Henkel has joined the initiative of ‘Zero net deforestation by 2020’, in an attempt to reduce the impact of the company’s sourcing of palm oil.

To the future, Henkel is looking to innovation to improve its sustainability. The use of fossil fuel alternatives, such as coconut oil, lignite or algae oils are being studied, but may be as far as 20 years from becoming a core chemical feedstock.

Despite all these efforts, the fact remains that sustainability is a hard nut to crack. It will require a lot of time, effort and money from everyone involved with chemicals if the industry is to become what it needs to become. But given the health of the planet, given the public’s desire for sustainable products, given the moral obligation chemical traders and manufacturers have to source responsibly. Isn’t doing good a necessary evil?

Photo credit; SINCHEM Luca Cervone, Monica Palmirani

If there is a moral obligation on the agricultural industry to use its ‘big data’ to try and feed the world’s growing population, isn’t there also a moral obligation to protect farmers and agrichemical traders?

While new crop protection products and crop varieties have the power to feed a growing global population, some experts are advising caution in the amount and way that information is being shared. ‘Big data’ may help feed the world, but care should also be taken to protect the farmers, customers and chemical product traders involved.

This is a point highlighted in a recent article by Prof. Ian Boyd, Chief Scientific Adviser at Defra, the British ministry responsible for, among other things, agriculture. He wrote that, “As the population increases and food production becomes more costly due to climate change and uncertainties about energy and fertiliser production, open data has the capacity to be an important part of the solution to global problems of food poverty and poor nutrition.”

However, despite being a speaker at the UN’s recent GODAN (Global Open Data in Agriculture and Nutrition) meeting in New York, Boyd still maintains his reservations over the sharing of data and its conflict with personal security. Stating that, “Central to the risks associated with data is personal information. Everybody leaves behind their digital fingerprint as they engage in digital economies. For those who wish to, there are ways of using these signals to find out more about us than perhaps some people might wish. I am a great supporter of better use of data, but we need to make sure that people know what data there is about them, how it is being used, and by whom.”

So while data is shared to feed the world, data sharing should be limited to save the individual.

Agribusiness companies who spend millions of dollars researching improved fertilisers, pesticides, herbicides, and crop varieties do well in sharing their knowledge and products with the world’s hand-to-mouth farmers. But this information should be disseminated carefully, as we all (including farmers and agrichemical traders) have a right to privacy.

Using and trading agribusiness products is a secretive industry, where prices and market intelligence comes at a price. This means, that when it comes to big data in agrichemical products, it needs a portion of caution to make sharing caring.

Photo credit: Nick Mesely

Scientists have discovered what they believe to be the best performing, extreme-condition glue in the world. By vertically aligning carbon nanotubes with tops bundled into nodes, they have found a dry adhesive that works effectively in temperatures as low as -196°C, and incredibly, performs even better in temperatures as high as 1000°C.

Surprising even themselves with the test results, the researchers, which included Prof. Liming Dai and Feng Du from Case Western Reserve, Ming Xu, from Case School of Engineering, and Sabyasachi Ganguli and Ajit Roy, of the Air Force Research Laboratory, used electron microscope technology to find out exactly how an adhesive could get stronger as the temperature rose.

By doing this they discovered that the basic adhesion was created by the bundled nodes penetrating into the cavities of a surface, and then collapsing into ‘web-like structures’. As temperatures rise, many surfaces the flexible nanotubes no longer remain vertically aligned but collapse into web-like structures.

“When you have aligned nanotubes with bundled tops penetrating into the cavities of the surface, you generate sufficient van der Waal’s forces to hold.” Xu explained, “The dry adhesive doesn’t lose adhesion as it cools because the surface doesn’t change. But when you heat the surface, the surface becomes rougher, physically locking the nanotubes in place, leading to stronger adhesion as temperatures increase.”

Moreover, the tests showed that the adhesive functioned well through repeated periods of freezing and heating. While the online science journal Phys.org notes, “The researchers dub this adhesion mechanism ‘nano-interlocking.’”

The research team described the excellent results in the journal Nature Communications, as follows, “This unusual adhesion behaviour can be rationalized [as] the plasma-induced carbon nanotube (CNT) top nodes can easily penetrate into cavities of a naturally or temperature-induced rough surface, followed by temperature-induced deformation of the flexible double-walled CNT segments along the surface profile to form nano-interlocks. The screw-like nano-interlocking interaction distinguishes the CNT dry adhesive reported in this study from other conventional adhesives, including conventional CNT dry adhesives and polymeric dry adhesives. Our CNT dry adhesives sustain many temperature transition cycles over a wide operational temperature range from −196 to 1,000 °C with a high thermal stability and a temperature-enhanced adhesion strength up to 143 N cm⁻² (one of the highest adhesion strengths among all known pure CNT dry adhesives).”

Diagram showing the preparation procedure of the CNT dry adhesive.

Top-view scanning electron microscopic (SEM) image of the rationally designed fibrillar adhering surface generated by plasma etching the nonaligned, entangled top nanotube segments on the as-grown VA-DWNT array.

The researchers noted that the adhesive should work on a wide variety of surfaces. While the tests were only conducted on copper foil; it is a material that is not unique in the way it changes when heat is applied. The surface of many materials, including polymer films and other metal foils, become rougher when heated, making them good targets for this kind of adhesive.

Although the team suggests that an adhesive as tough as they have discovered would be ideal for use in space, the ability to bind two surfaces together at the extremes of both hot and cold will have multiple applications. Possibly uses include on deep sea craft, especially those exploring underwater thermal vents, or on aircraft which can reach very high temperatures on runways in hot climates, before climbing into the sub-zero conditions of the stratosphere.

While very large scale production may still be some way in the future, many in the adhesives industry are already speculating on where is best to stick such a resilient adhesive.
 

Photo credit: Nuaawhaa

Photo credit: Ming Xu, Feng Du, Sabyasachi Ganguli, Ajit Roy and Liming Dai