During the course of FY23 USB project work, Sironix Renewables developed and tested a new surfactant production process that uses fatty acids from hydrogenated soybean oil as feedstocks to produce fully plant-based, high-performing surfactants with potential application in the personal care, cleaning, and HI&I product spaces. The final deliverable was completed, with Sironix generating a second generation soybean surfactant from a hydrogenated soybean oil sample (M-155, Owensboro Grain), in addition to demonstrating both a scalable production process and surfactant performance competitive to state-of-the-art commercial surfactants in the personal care and cleaning application spaces.

This project serves to benefit U.S. soybean farmers by developing new technology and applications for soybean oil in the consumer and commercial cleaning products industry. Commercialization of high-performing, biorenewable, domestic, and cost-competitive surfactants in this project enables substantial market penetration of soybean-based surfactants into the $12 billion cleaning and personal care product markets. Continued development of biorenewable surfactants developed by Sironix will enable expansion beyond the cleaning products market into the broader anionic surfactants market, including such applications as paints/inks/coatings and agrochemical spray products.