Green Chemistry Concepts in Personal Care and Cosmetics

Posted: February 14, 2008

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Jeneil’s rhamnolipid biosurfactant products provide good emulsification, wetting, detergency and foaming properties, along with very low toxicity. They are readily biodegradable and leave no harmful or persistent degradation products. Their superior qualities make them suitable for many diverse applications.

Rhamnolipid biosurfactant is a naturally occurring extracellular glycolipid that is found in the soil and on plants. Jeneil produces this biosurfactant commercially in controlled, aerobic fermentations using particular strains of the soil bacterium, Pseudomonas aeruginosa. The biosurfactant is recovered from the fermentation broth after sterilization and centrifugation, then purified to various levels to fit intended applications.

In many applications, these biosurfactants can replace less biodegradable synthetic or petroleum-derived surfactants. Further, these biosurfactants have excellent synergistic activity with many synthetic surfactants and, when formulated together in a cosurfactant system, can allow a substantial reduction in the synthetic surfactant component.

Greener Processes
Biotechnological routes to ‘tailored’ polymeric products: Polymers could be made from renewable resources that involve all-aqueous, green chemicals by using microbial polymerizations, except for one problem: the inability to control product structural variables that ultimately determine functional properties.

Richard A. Gross in the department of chemistry, University of Massachusetts at Lowell and David L. Kaplan, department of chemical engineering, Tufts University addressed this problem by disclosing a family of technologies that demonstrated unprecedented levels of control for nonribosomal-mediated microbial polymerizations.