Sustainable Solutions in the European Market

Essen Solution Center Brings Sustainable Solutions to European Markets The Essen facility, bright, modern and built for growth, fosters an environment of creativity and innovation. The Essen facility, a flagship innovation center for the region and built for growth, provides a creative and innovative environment. Univar Solutions's newest Solution Center in Germany—the Essen facility—is ideally suited and generously sized to serve key markets across Europe spanning beauty and personal care through household and industrial cleaning, elastomers (CASE), pharmaceutical applications, coatings, adhesives, sealants and much more. The Essen facility, supported by our team of impressive technical, commercial and environmental experts—doctorate-level scientists, chemical engineers and technicians—is the newest innovation center in our hub-and-spoke model for sustainable innovation. The facility is bright, modern and contemporary. It is like a startup within our company, with an environment so attractive that you will want to encourage new ideas and create new things. It gives us great enthusiasm and energy to assemble teams, work on projects, organize trainings and invite our customers and partners to our Solution Center to showcase our laboratories, equipment and what we can do with them. The Essen Solution Center represents a significant investment of time, money, resources and human capital to bring together the best brains, tools and equipment to establish one of Europe's most important innovation centers. Now this investment pays for itself in every new solution. For those of us who come here every day, it is a unique experience.

The Solution Center in Essen Boasts an Impressive Roster of Talent and Equipment

We started from scratch and built the center into an existing building at our German headquarters—currently a state-of-the-art laboratory spanning 700 square meters (over 7,500 square feet) and test equipment that facilitates new and improved formulations across multiple industries we serve. We have a spectrophotometer that enables us to test cleaning performance in laundry and other household and industrial cleaning products. A tissue analyzer produces test data to support performance claims in shampoos, hair conditioners and related personal care and cosmetic applications. We also have a pilot facility that will help companies scale their production line by enabling faster and easier transition from new or improved formulation to production. The Essen Solution Center was built for growth with ample space to host customers, supplier partners and visitors for educational seminars, demonstrations and innovation sessions. Since our opening, we have hosted hundreds of visitors and everyone has been quite impressed.

Univar Solutions; A Place Where People Matter, This Core Value Is Brought to Life Every Day at the Essen Solution Center

No matter how bright and inspiring our new laboratories and equipment are, the real stars of our Solution Centers are our employees. Beyond our broad technical expertise, what I most enjoy as a technology leader at Essen is our multicultural team, representing different nationalities, backgrounds and experiences. The people here are incredibly inspiring and we have so much to learn from each other. As we use these ingredients, materials and products—testing their qualities and performance in real time—daily conversations and discussions face-to-face with many talented and creative minds energize us. What is learned surpasses and improves our results, adding tremendous value to what we do here.

The Truly Face-to-Face and Live Interactions That Make Our Solution Centers Work

At our Solution Centers, we are engineers, chemists and technicians but also consultants. We consult with our suppliers and their development teams to showcase materials and components. We consult with our customers to understand their needs and business drivers from every angle. We consult with our colleagues within Univar Solutions to bring talent and experience to every new challenge. And we collaborate at every level to move the best solutions forward. As we work with supplier base materials and specialty chemicals, we provide core learning to both suppliers and the customers using the material. The learning is two-way and this collaboration creates a rich, productive environment where people and ideas matter.

Highlight Projects at the Center

Many of our initial project commitments supported beauty and personal care as well as household and industrial cleaning challenges. We perform numerous performance and efficiency tests on products we develop by working with both suppliers and customers to improve ingredients and support product development with the concrete data customers need to support their product claims. Here is a great example spanning industries and applications: We worked with a leading wax supplier to help bring a vegan alternative to market that could replace beeswax in personal care, food and related industrial applications. Beeswax is widely used in personal care, cosmetics and numerous industrial products where the natural source and its ability to provide emulsification, moisture and texture—and other performance factors—have made it the best choice for formulators for a long time. But with more consumers trending toward vegan and manufacturers wanting to optimize safety and sustainability in their supply chains, product manufacturers are increasingly seeking a more suitable vegan wax substitute. Our testing and analysis helped the beeswax supplier put core performance data behind 100 percent plant-based material, validating properties such as pH, stability, viscosity and crystallization. Today this vegan wax alternative can be used in a range of products from cosmetics, lotions and conditioners to food packaging and candles. And this is just the first step. Helping the beeswax supplier bring a more robust material to market opens new opportunities for product manufacturers to gain a competitive advantage. Now we can show companies across markets and applications how to use this hero ingredient in their own completely new products or improved formulations.

Advancing Sustainability for Our Suppliers and Customers

It is hard to overstate the impact of sustainability on our work at Essen or how we bring more sustainable solutions to market. The message comes directly from our customers: We must develop completely sustainable products from cradle to grave, keeping the circular economy in mind. This is a mandatory question because sustainability targets must be met. A core concern of our customers is having sustainable products from natural sources. Today's products cannot contain critical items like microplastics that pass through water filtration systems, polluting groundwater and oceans and harming marine life. We developed an eco-friendly, concentrated hand dish washing formulation that succeeded in reducing weight as much as effectiveness. Consumer needs related to sustainability go beyond formulation and must account for processing, packaging, shipping and storage factors. We are increasingly working on concentrates that reduce water use and weight throughout the entire supply chain. Companies do not want to transport water from point A to point B, and this trend is gaining momentum across industries and markets. The vegan wax project is another good example because it addresses a material people already think is natural, but takes sustainability to the next level by allowing formulators to make cruelty-free claims with a plant-based alternative. While formulators continue to offer unique and trendy methods and products that people will want to try, they are looking for new and better ways to deliver sustainability performance. This resonates especially in cosmetics and personal care, where store shelves are filled with products making a range of sustainability claims—from bio-based ingredients through biodegradability to recycled packaging.

A Trendy Product Developed Through Work at Essen

A fun example from cosmetics, where it is hard to miss the growing interest in eyelash and eyebrow products. In cosmetic applications such as hair gels, hair sprays and now eyebrow styling products, synthetic polymers are widely used and highly valued for their excellent hold and handling properties, but cosmetic manufacturers are seeking ways to reduce synthetic polymer levels in favor of more natural offerings to improve the sustainability profiles of their products. To this end, we developed a more sustainable eyebrow styling product by combining a new corn-based styling polymer called MaizeCare Clarity from Dow with xanthan gum, a natural thickener from Cargill. Although the performance experience was somewhat different, we achieved great results with a natural system and provided product manufacturers with an excellent starting point to benefit from more sustainable eyebrow products and cosmetic applications.

Our Pilot Facility and Capabilities

We added to the Essen Solution Center a brand-new asset called a pilot facility, which supports scaling laboratory sizes up to 10 liters to production sizes for many applications across the global industries we serve. With this intermediate step, our ability to help customers scale production and enable companies to move to production faster and more easily is quite a different factor in the market. With this equipment, by creating formulations in a beaker and then mimicking production size, we can help identify and mitigate technical and processing issues and help even small manufacturers shorten development time. This is another way we provide end-to-end project services from concept and development through application testing, launch and distribution. * Silke Langer brings over twenty years of technical expertise in personal care and related markets to help companies bring new products to market, improve existing products and take advantage of new trends to stay ahead of the competition. A chemical engineer with strong project leadership skills in applications, her commercial and marketing experience makes her an ideal problem solver and solution provider. Author Silke Langer* Solution Center Team Lead Univar Solutions Translation and Compilation Yasemin Engin Regional Sales Manager Personal Care Univar Solutions