Bioeconomy solutions could help to reduce our reliance on imported fossil products, while contributing to climate and environmental goals. However, to compete with reliable and affordable fossil-based products available on the market since decades, they should demonstrate unique benefits.
Bio-based and bio- surfactants promise to provide improvements in chemical safety, use of sustainable raw materials, biodegradability, and carbon footprint, with the potential to replace conventional surfactants in many application areas, such as home and personal care products, textile, food, and agriculture.
However, aspects such as quality and cost-effectiveness of processing, functionalities, supply chain and feedstock selection and diversification need to be addressed. Moreover, though on the one hand end-user and consumers are attracted by improved safety and sustainability, they might be sceptical about functionalities, and costs, of the new solutions.
All these aspects challenge the work of technology developers, that must address multiple needs and expectations.
The SURFs UP and SurfToGreen projects work to accelerate the transition toward renewable and low-impact bio-surfactants and bio-based surfactants by transforming agricultural and forest residues, waste streams, and other locally sourced feedstock into new safe, sustainable, and scalable solution for the European bio-based economy.
The projects are applying a life cycle thinking approach, based on the Safe and Sustainable by Design (SSbD) framework, with a focus on the following steps:
- Scoping: to identify life cycle stages, design principles and objectives of the innovation, value chain actors;
- Mapping: to gather information about chemicals, materials, processes and related parameters, and their impacts, in the first-place hazard and exposure hot spots;
- Assessing: to evaluate safety, environmental and socio-economic aspects in parallel with research development, going from qualitative to more quantitative assessment;
- Decision-making: to combine the different assessment and make informed decision toward more sustainable and desirable products.
Cornerstones of these actions are: the close interaction and engagement with stakeholders along the relevant innovation value chain(s), from technology developers to end-users; the combination of assessment methods covering the safety, environmental and social dimensions; the use of decision-making tools to define appropriate trade-offs based on the outcomes of the different assessments.
An increasing attention is given to social aspects, as innovations often fail if they are not aligned with societal values. However, these are often difficult to address and hardly quantifiable: when dealing with products that are not yet on the market, the functions, applications, value chain(s) are not yet built up. In addition, new products might induce structural change in the system in which they will be used, making any forecast of their impacts even more difficult.
But this makes even more important to understand and anticipate needs of stakeholder, including implicit and explicit aspects. This helps to provide contextual knowledge, improve legitimacy of the scientific work, and thus long-term acceptance, and as well limit the risk of developing so called “regrettable substitutions”.
However, in most of the cases stakeholder engagement is only considered towards the end of the development process. The perspective should be the other way around, start from stakeholder and consumers behaviour and awareness.
We are discussing these and many other aspects of bio-based and bio- surfactant in joint webinars organized by the SurfToGreen and SURFs UP projects; the first, which saw the participation of more than 30 experts, was focused on “Building public trust in bioeconomy” (December 2025, see the agenda here).
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