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2013|14 Annual Report Fraunhofer IGB

Increased demand for organic cosmetics More and more, consumers are viewing the use of petro- chemicals-based ingredients in cosmetic products critically and are increasingly asking for natural or organic cosmetics. How- ever, the range and variety of the natural products are limited owing to the restricted availability of organically certified ingredients. Furthermore, the production of these cosmetic ingredients involves some technological challenges and is still very expensive. The cosmetics industry is therefore endeavor- ing to meet the rising demands of consumers as regards safe- ty – for the environment and for health – of the raw materials used, and to replace fossil-based with renewable resources. Certifiable manufacturing production process from the cultivation of the raw materials through to the biobased product This challenge is being tackled by the consortium of the EU- funded project “O4S – Sustainable surfactant production from renewable resources through natural fermentation for applications in natural, organically-certified products”. The O4S project is developing a fully certifiable process chain by means of which renewable resources can be obtained from certified organic crops using environmentally-friendly methods to produce biobased emulsifiers and biosurfactants, in order to use them in organically certified cosmetics. Accordingly, the aims of the project are the identification of organically certified, affordable substrates such as sugars and oils and the development of a certifiable manufacturing process for biosurfactants. The substrates should be obtained from waste materials from organic agriculture and by-products from food production. Biosurfactants – alternatives to chemically synthesized biosurfactants Surfactants and emulsifiers can be found not only in clean- ing agents and detergents, but also in cosmetics. Shampoos, shower gels and bath additives consist of up to 40 percent surfactants, which lower the surface tension of water. A large proportion of the surfactants currently used are chemically de- rived. Although oils from renewable raw materials are increas- ingly being used as raw materials in addition to petroleum, the coconut or palm kernel oils generally used are classified as ecologically critical. Biosurfactants are an alternative to this. These are washing-active substances produced by micro- organisms. Currently, only a few of these biosurfactants are produced industrially, since their production is still relatively expensive. In order to make biosurfactants profitable for natu- ral cosmetics, the Fraunhofer IGB is developing, in the O4S project, a sustainable, cost-reducing and certifiable manufac- turing process, which includes the biotechnological fermenta- tion and the purification of biosurfactant products. Manufacture of organically certified biosurfactants In order to be able to classify biosurfactants as 100 percent certified “organic”, the whole process chain must be evalu- ated and certified. This starts with the selection of the feed- stocks: their suitability as a source for a certifiable fermenta- tion process is examined on the basis of the standardized 10 6 MANUFACTURE OF ORGANICALLY CERTIFIED COSMETICS FROM RENEWABLE RAW MATERIALS Dr. rer. nat. Ana Lucía Vásquez Caicedo, Dr.-Ing. Susanne Zibek, Priv.-Doz. Dr. Steffen Rupp, Dipl.-Ing. Siegfried Egner CHEMISTRY 1 2

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