Through a new partnership, Unilever aims to develop a variety of sugar cane to extract plant-based oils for use in our cleaning ingredients.
Unilever and Nufarm, a global agriculture innovator, are partnering to develop and commercialise a crop of the future. The project aims to cultivate a crop with significant biomass to produce sustainable oils. The biomass oil – derived from plant material, including the leaves and stems – will be a source of fatty acids, a core base ingredient for Unilever’s laundry detergents and beauty and personal care products.
Typically, plant oils like sunflower and canola are produced in the seeds and fruits. The breakthrough of this technology is that the oil will be grown using the entire plant – including the leaves – in crops like cane and sorghum (a cereal grain).
Nufarm has previously developed and commercialised a variety of sugar cane called energy cane, a sustainable crop which generates significantly more plant matter and sugar than traditional sugar cane. Through this investment, Unilever will leverage recent breakthroughs in biotechnology to develop a new, commercially viable variety of energy cane that can also produce biomass oil.
The goal of this technology is to reduce Unilever’s reliance on petrochemical-based ingredients and would be the first time a biomass crop has been optimised to produce the plant-based oil which, if successfully grown at scale, will be used as an ingredient in consumer goods products.
In its current form, energy cane already has sustainability benefits such as climate stress tolerance, drought resistance and more efficient protection of soil against erosion. It also has harvesting benefits for farmers and the environment. The project aims to replicate and build on these traits in the new crop which would contribute to the company’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reduction ambitions in ingredient sourcing.
