Interview to Gilles De Smet, Oleon and SurfToGreen partner
Made on 10th February 2026
What are the most relevant trends in the bio-based feedstock sector, looking at materials, processes, and applications?
Sustainability is the main driver. Both EU policies and regulations and customers are pushing for more sustainable, biodegradable, and safe products. This is one of our core targets within Oleon, strengthened by being part of the Avril group: we aim to have at least 90% of our product portfolio being readily biodegradable, especially for newly developed products.
Some of the most relevant trends are the decarbonization, as indicated by the EU Grean Deal and its assessment framework on “Safe and Sustainable by Design” (SSbD), and the demand for deforestation-free products, based on the EU Regulation on deforestation-free products (EUDR), related both to products produced and imported in the EU.
There are also other initiatives to consider, such as the Cosmos certification in home and personal care sectorith a focus on using non-GMO and cruelty-free products, and the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) establishing global standards for sustainable palm oil production.
These norms are important to strive for high quality sustainability standards of both materials and processes.
Industry aims at decreasing carbon footprint of operations and products, integrating the SSbD framework. This relates for example to the product atom economy (a metric comparing the number of reactant atoms with the number of the final product atoms) which should be as high as possible, as most of the initial carbon is incorporated into the final product; this improves the overall carbon footprint and reduces waste generation.
For example, at Oleon we are working on the enzymatic synthesis of esters, as a step towards a net zero carbon economy. We also commit at reducing our greenhouse gases emissions by 30% by 2030 compared to 2019. We are focusing on green innovations and raw materials responsibly sourced and produced.
Are there specific kind of feedstock that are being pushed to achieve higher sustainability?
Although not all feedstocks can be used to produce any product, nowadays our knowledge and capacity allow to be creative. We can develop new chemistry and use less impactful crops to achieve the same results as a very impactful crop. For example, we use responsibly sourced sunflower oil as much as possible, as it performs better in terms of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and carbon footprint compared to other crops.
The Oleon Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) strategy requires that, in addition to the regular safety and technical data sheets, all our commercial products also have an environmental data sheet, where we list environmental impacts from carbon footprint to eutrophication. Customers appreciate the transparency of verifying our products impact on the environment.
However, it is difficult to indicate a most used or most promising crop. Oil is extracted from crops, and split into fatty acids: the fatty acid composition is quite specific to the oil, thus different crops serve different applications.
For short chain fatty acids (C8-C12), often used for production of strongly hydrophilic surfactants, tropical oils, not native to Europe, are required (e.g. palm oil or coconut oil), but the feedstock must comply with our responsible sourcing policy including RSPO and EUDR. Many new types of crops are being researched as alternatives; for example, the very promising European camelina oil or the Southern American castor oil, which does not compete with the food chain, a crucial aspect to consider for sustainability. Castor oil could be cultivated in southern Europe, but the is still missing.
What are the advantages and disadvantages of using bio-based feedstock to develop bio-based surfactants and related products?
The most evident advantage is to contribute to a circular carbon economy as bio-based feedstocks consume carbon from the atmosphere, making it part of a renewable carbon cycle. Petrol-based products typically result from impactful industrial processes, while bio-based products rely on safer production processes.
Beyond this, each bio-based solution has advantages and disadvantages.
Chemical structures
The most effective solution for a bio-based product is a drop-in chemical, which directly replaces a petroleum-based product, having an identical chemical structure and similar or same function and performance.
There are several challenges to address in these cases. For example, bio-based drop-in chemicals often result in different colour or odour of the product. Where petroleum-based products tend to be extremely refined, reaching a colourless and an odourless product with 99.5% or higher chemical purity, bio-based products are often a mix of structures that make it difficult to reach the purity that customers are used to. I think the biggest hurdle to take is to analyse and process the molecular heterogeneity of bio-based feedstock, since nature favours entropy resulting in complex mixtures.
Alternatively, bio-based products with a different or novel chemical structure compared to their petro-based counterpart (not a drop-in), serving the same function with similar performance, also exist. However, registration and certification (REACH, INCI, COSMOS) are time consuming and required before accessing the market and get accepted by it. Nevertheless, once registered, they offer unique products with unique positions in the market.
Within SurfToGreen we aim to develop both drop-ins and novel chemical structures by leveraging agricultural and forest-based feedstock in the broadest sense possible.
A clear advantage in switching to bio-based is increasing the product safety. Since counter-intuitive to make a bio-based product which still has similar hazards of a petroleum-based one, the challenge is to avoid hazardous reactions while processing the biomass, which itself is safer.
Feedstock supplies
Though crop seasonality might be seen as a supply issue for biobased products, this is often not the case. Moreover, the bio-chemical industry consumes only 15-20% of total vegetable oil produced and there is the option to rely on different crops; regardless, we must make sure that their cultivation is sustainable. The versatility of using multiple feedstock sources is exactly what we want to exploit within SurfToGreen, including EU-sourced sunflower and rapeseed oil.
The impacts of climate change on feedstock production are another challenge. We closely monitor this type of impact, given we are using feedstock from all over the world. In Europe the impact of climate change in crops cultivation is still limited, but in Asia or South America it is increasing, due to rising sea levels, more extreme rain season, and high temperatures during summer.
Costs
A clear disadvantage of bio-based solutions are costs, caused both by supply and by biomass optimization, purification and reaction processes. While it is improving for some bulk products or some cost-driven applications, this remains a hurdle yet to be overtaken. Solutions include performing processes at mild conditions (low temperature, low pressure), and with the least amount of catalyst. However, this remains a challenge. For example, the purification process often requires a cycle of purification steps through distillation and filtration, aiming at decreased colour and odour to be market appealing, and the longer the process the higher the cost is. In addition, it is important to consider the one-time cost to register new chemicals.
Petroleum based refining processes are advantaged by decades of research and optimization, with yields often close to 100%. On the contrary, bio-based chemicals are developing fast, but yield optimization will need more time. One key aspect is to valorise each byproduct, whether it be unreacted feedstock that can be recycled, a side product, or a pitch from a distillation.
New value chains are being built, which also helps in minimising cost and waste. It is better to find secondary markets (ranging from lubricants to fertilizers) for the leftover products of the chemical reactions, rather than let them be burned for caloric value. we strive for a cascading use of our solutions, through as many collaborations or synergies with other value chains as possible.
I tend to see the future quite brightly on this. Especially for cosmetic ingredients (home and personal care), younger generations of customers are willing to accept a higher price for sustainability. Moreover, increased production volumes are decreasing the costs, even if . Bio-based economy is growing rapidly in Europe: it is a sector where Europe can stand out from competitors, such as huge chemical companies in Asia. We have to show that we are a hub for innovation, and we commit with the solutions that everyone has been asking for
Which is the novelty and added value of the SurfToGreen process and product solutions?
The added value is to go beyond the mere compliance to legislation: we aim to improve compared to bio-based surfactants already on the market, which might have limitations in different aspects, including performance, environmental impact, safety, and costs.
SurfToGreen aims to develop a fully bio-based surfactant platform, including anionic, nonionic, cationic, and zwitterionic surfactants families, and as well as hydrotropes and chelates: a whole set of different molecules, readily biodegradable and that can cover a high share of the global surfactant use.
The SurfToGreen approach fits well with the 12 principles of Green Chemistry and the holistic approach of the Safe and Sustainable by Design (SSbD) framework, assessing the whole value chain and applying iterative feedback loops. We make assessment of health, safety and environmental and end of life aspects of our innovations already in the early stage of development, and if it is not performing enough, we go back to the drawing table and start again, until we reach competitive targets on sustainability, performances and costs.
This approach and demanding targets of SurfToGreen require an efficient collaboration among partners, and is one of the challenges of the project.
SurfToGreen will develop knowledge on structure-activity relationship of products, allowing to understand how changing the chemical structure influences the functionalities of the end-product. It is a challenging but essential task, also to improve in sustainability, given the complexity of the chemical structure of bio-based surfactants.
We are using Design of Experiments to reduce the number of experiments to perform. Our tools generate a model of all the parameters in the reaction setup and gives an initial limited set of experiments to perform, and from their results it outlines the next experiments. This shortens the development time, also allowing to predict variation on multiple parameters at the same time before reaching the optimal setup, e.g. for temperature, pressure, catalyst loading, etc.
These approaches allow us to face the scale-up issue, where a lot of starts-ups and research struggle. Thanks to Oleon, Nouryon, and SpigaNord manufacturing capacities and experience in scaling-up bio-based feedstocks, and to an in-depth understanding of the science behind our surfactants, we aim to overcome this hurdle and reach high volume productions.
We are aware that there is no such thing as a “100% green solution”: we can constantly improve towards a greener solution compared to benchmarks. And thanks to the combined knowledge and expertise of SurfToGreen Consortium, we will reach greener solutions with a remarkable impact.
Which is your experience in SurfToGreen so far, and how do you plan to apply and use its results?
What I like the most is the collaboration with such a broad Consortium, where every partner brings its unique expertise. We work closely together with our end users, ranging from special applications, like Adsorbi’s air purification technologies, to others like P&G home and personal care. We have also representations from all over Europe, and in Asia with our associated partners from China (Sichuan University) and Japan (Shiseido and Nikko Chemicals). It is nice to discuss openly about needs and opportunities for product development. For Oleon, we also aim to showcase our expertise in chemical processing, while addressing new markets and relations as much as possible.
This will help to tailor the products we currently offer to more specific needs and promote them for new applications, remaining at the forefront of innovation towards bio-based and biodegradable products. This fits well with our and Avril’s strategic roadmap and purpose, that is “serving the Earth” and it is based on three pillars: take action for the climate, protect natural resources and biodiversity, and take action for collective and inclusive projects like SurfToGreen.
About
I work as an R&D engineer in Oleon, part of the Avril group, specifically in the synthesis and analysis team. The research our team is working on regards building blocks based on oils and fats, from which we develop new products.
Within the SurfToGreen project, we are Work Package 1 leaders, working on the building block synthesis: we develop and deliver the hydrophobic parts of the building blocks, being fatty acid and fatty acid derivatives. Then, in Work Package 2 we are a partner developing surfactants, thanks to our years of experience in chemical processing and synthesis. We also contribute to the process upscaling, alongside Nouryon.