Research Institute Director Lion Corporation, Japan
Abstract: To achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), reducing the environmental burden caused by household life is an important issue. Focusing on laundry, we can expect to reduce environmental burden through products that enable conserving water and electricity when washing, suppressing damage to clothing caused by washing, and curbing chemical emissions derived from detergents. With this in mind, we attempted to develop a new washing technology that will lead to reduction of environmental burden by limiting the amount of surfactant used for laundry. Limiting the use of surfactants in detergent ingredients leads to issues such as weaker detergency and darkening of clothes. Aiming to solve the above problems by combining surfactants and polymers, we focused on the use of a new polymer that could contribute to the improvement of detergency and anti-soil redeposition ability. As a result of evaluation using various polymers with hydrophilic groups and hydrophobic groups, we confirmed that the combination of a specific alkoxylated cationic polymer and surfactant demonstrated greater detergency and anti-soil redeposition ability. This combination can be utilized to reduce the amount of surfactant used in detergents by 50% while still achieving detergency and anti-soil redeposition ability equivalent to conventional products. One of the reasons for this result is thought to be the improvement of dispersibility of liquid fat. In this report, we discuss the characteristics and washing mechanism of the alkoxylated cationic polymer. We also report on a new concept of laundry detergent that utilizes this washing technology as well as the environmental benefits such as reduction of water consumption and CO2 emissions during washing through use of this detergent.
