Innovation How Kao Reinvented Laundry Detergents With A Breakthrough Sustainable Surfactant Kao Contributor Brand Contributor Kao BRANDVOICE Storytelling and expertise from marketers | Paid Program Aug 9, 2022, 03:49pm EDT | Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin Kao researchers, from left to right: Toku Fujioka, Takaya Sakai, Hiroshi Hori kao In 2020, a new surfactant won the Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry Award at the 20th Green and Sustainable Chemistry Awards event hosted by the Japan Association for Chemical Innovation. The compound has been highly acclaimed among academic societies in Europe, a leading region in sustainability, and now it is attracting attention from around the world. This extraordinary surfactant is Bio IOS, developed by the Kao Corporation of Japan. “Not only does Bio IOS use the residue of pressed palm oil collected from the fruit of the palm as a raw material, but it’s more soluble in water, and cleans better than conventional detergent bases, even in small amounts,” says Bio IOS R&D leader Masato Nomura. “It’s also highly biodegradable and has low aquatic biotoxicity. Bio IOS products significantly reduce CO2 emissions and water pollution. This success that has been praised from all quarters. ” Bio IOS has gained widespread recognition for its contribution to environmental sustainability. It has also raised awareness of how surfactants can make a difference. This revolutionary technology and the products that use it embody Kao’s strong customer and social values. Forbes JAPAN spoke to researchers at Kao who developed Bio IOS in 2019 to find out how they pulled off such a remarkable feat. The story begins when the researchers predicted that the simple daily task of doing laundry would become more expensive and difficult due to scarcity of vegetable oils and fats used as raw ingredients in detergents. They reasoned that the world’s population will have increased 1. 3 times by 2050 compared to 2017. The number of detergent users will mushroom as GDP increases 3. 2 times and living standards rise sharply. The supply of vegetable oils and fats will be unable to keep pace with demand, impacting the quality and cost of production and distribution. Kao’s R&D team rose to the challenge of solving this previously unidentified problem that could have a significant impact on the lives of consumers. We met the research team at Kao's Material Science Research Laboratory in Wakayama City, Japan. Wakayama turned out to be integral to the story of the breakthrough surfactant. A Surfactant Catalyst For A Sustainable Society In January 2019, then Kao senior principal research scientist Dr. Takaya Sakai, now a research fellow, and his team developed a surfactant named Bio IOS, which was announced as the best detergent base in the company’s history and is said to be the world's first such invention in 50 years. “I call it the old and new surfactant that’s a catalyst for a sustainable society,” says Sakai. “As you most likely learned in elementary school science class, a surfactant is like soap, which makes bubbles. The reason cosmetics and creams spread smoothly is that the surfactant helps combine oils and water to make them easier to mix. ” International surfactant researchers and makers have been focused on environmental sustainability for some 20 years, longer than many other industries. That’s because detergents must be well soluble in water, highly effective at removing even small amounts of dirt and harmless to the environment. kao “Here’s an example that illustrates the point,” Sakai explains. “If you’ve ever washed your body in a hotel in Europe, you may have noticed that the soap doesn’t foam up. That’s not because of the soap quality, but because of the water hardness. ” To make detergents more soluble in water, the temperature must be higher for harder water. Moreover, washing laundry requires hot water, which is energy inefficient. Surfactant developers have tackled environmental issues by using vegetable oils as raw materials, maximizing biodegradability and minimizing the impact on aquatic organisms. Now, however, those vegetable oils are about to become scarce. “The standard of living in the world will improve, the market will expand, and Kao will expand its business throughout the world,” Sakai says. “But to target the wider world, we must create surfactant technologies that can achieve the maximum effect even when using minute amounts. It's not something we can do overnight, because R&D takes time. Our group has been on the case for over a decade. ” This was just the beginning of Sakai's challenges. Unbelievable Experimental Results Research and development of Bio IOS began in 2010. There was no textbook to follow and no guarantee of success. Even Sakai, an expert in surfactants, was confronted with many challenges. Gradually, Sakai and those around him became skeptical, wondering if this surfactant could be effective because it demonstrated no outstanding features. “What distressed me most was when I had to make the choice between quitting my studies on Bio IOS or starting the research all over again,” he recalls. “Whichever way I chose, I had to come up with some convincing reason to justify a course of action. I was at my wits’ end because I didn't know what to do. ” In 2011, Hiroshi Hori, a new researcher who had just joined Kao that year, began work to design a molecular structure that exhibited uniquely suitable characteristics for a detergent. The team wondered if the research could lead to a practical product, but many agreed that they would press on. A turning point came in 2015. kao Eventually, members of the Material Science Research Laboratory discovered a possibility. “Generally, improving the water-solubility of surfactants decreases detergency and improving detergency worsens solubility,” Sakai explains. “So detergency and solubility are a tradeoff, but Bio IOS demonstrated the possibility of achieving both and I thought, ‘Wow, this is amazing!’” From the start of his research he was given a high-level mission by the company. It was "Research enough that he could write a book on it. " This brought the team closer to the miraculous discovery of this "Bio IOS". Sakai first doubted the experimental results, so he repeated the tests until he was totally convinced. “This is it,” he said. Bio IOS was such a game-changer for three reasons: its high surface activity, which removes dirt with just a small amount of detergent; its high water solubility, which makes it easily dissolvable even in low temperatures and hard water; and the fact that it uses biomass from solid parts of the oil palm, making it a model for sustainability. The team changed the playing field for detergent raw materials. The result is shorter laundry washing times. And by changing the raw material from a liquid oil to a solid oil, which can also be obtained from oil palms, not only is energy efficiency increased at the time of washing, but the amounts of oil palms needed for manufacturing can also be reduced. In 2016, when Sakai announced the revolutionary specifications of Bio IOS at a Kao in-house meeting, attendees said his results were impossible. Thinking Outside the Box It was Toku Fujioka of Kao’s Processing Development Research Laboratory who was responsible for scaling up Bio IOS for mass production. Effective manufacturing of Bio IOS was a major issue, as expected or calculated performance could not be achieved. It was a completely new detergent base and no data or accumulated stores existed. As the deadline approached, the team felt cornered. “It was literally chaos,” Fujioka recalls. kao “The hardest part was the test run of the actual equipment at the factory that year. It was sheer pandemonium, and although I had to hit the production quantity target, I just couldn’t make it happen. I failed over and over but kept repeating hypotheses and testing. Just when I was about to throw up my hands, at the last minute came the breakthrough. I can still remember happy look on everyone’s faces clearly at the moment we finally succeeded. My colleagues are my comrades. I can’t express it any other way. Making such friends has been a great reward for me in working at Kao. ” “When we get stuck in our research,” Sakai adds, “some people will be down in the dumps about it and even ask, ‘Just what is research?’ Then inevitably someone will echo Yoshio Maruta, saying, ‘Let’s return to the point of origin. ’” Yoshio Maruta was a Doctor of Engineering at Kyoto University who became president of Kao in 1971. He had a habit of saying, “go to bat with what you correctly understand,” and championed the importance of basic research, as the writer Saburo Shiroyama described the young Maruta in his novel Ume wa Nioi Hito wa Kokoro (Plums are Fragrance, People are Hearts). When Takaya Sakai joined the company, Maruta was the chairman and often told employees, “Our mission is to deliver truly valuable and high-quality products to consumers. ” This was a management philosophy typical of him, both an executive and a scientist. “Because Kao has everything from upstream to end product line, we can take responsibility for the whole breadth of what we do,” says Hiroshi Hori, who joined the company in 2011. The comment speaks to why the company has a factory in Wakayama—because it is directly connected to the port. The raw material for Bio IOS, derived from the seldom-used, solid parts of the palm fruit, is carried there directly by freighter. Kao is one of the very few detergent manufacturers in the world that starts with the development of raw materials. A smooth flow from raw materials to products and everything in between is a comprehensive concept that describes Kao’s idea of monozukuri (craftsmanship). It’s the approach that made it possible to invent a game-changing surfactant for the first time in 50 years. kao “Collecting information from textbooks to develop products might be the gathering of knowledge, but it’s not a research result,” Sakai says. ” Research is doing things that are not yet codified. Isn't it the biggest catharsis of all to find something that no one in the world knows or has done?” If the research has helped avoid a future in which people in the 2050 face detergent scarcity and higher prices, then these past 10 years in Wakayama were a turning point, Sakai says. Kao is using its one-of-a-kind Bio IOS surfactant in mass production and practical use in a variety of products. “We believe it is our mission to deliver the innovations that maintain and improve not just the quality and price of detergents but also the sustainability of the entire world,” says Hiroyuki Terazaki, an Executive Officer at Kao, and Vice President of R&D Strategy. “At Kao, we also apply our precise interfacial control technology to breakthroughs for increased food production, looking to solve the global problem of food shortages. Through steadfast, essential research and development we’ll continue to create customer and social value and contribute to the world. ” Kao Contributor Editorial Standards Print Reprints & Permissions.