PolyForm: a unified approach to biodegradable polymers for fabric care formulations

This fellowship will transform the environmental footprint of an essential human activity - the routine cleaning of clothes and other textiles. In the UK alone, dishwashers and washing machines use 360 billion litres of water each year and cost households £1.6bn in energy bills, with the majority of the electricity consumed in heating water (Energy Saving Trust, 2013). High-performance laundry and fabric care products enable effective cleaning at low temperatures with minimal quantities of water. They also extend garment lifetimes, avoiding their disposal in landfill sites. The performance of these formulations is only possible through the use of synthetic polymer additives, primarily derived from petroleum-based sources. Unfortunately, these persist in the environment over long timescales, greatly reducing the potential environmental benefits presented by their use.

Replacing current technologies with biodegradable alternatives gives us an opportunity to drastically improve the environmental profile of many essential consumer products, but achieving this goal is complicated by the scale of the challenge; requiring not only the development of new sustainable materials, but ensuring their functionality in complex, multi- component formulations. Whilst there has been significant drive to develop biodegradable polymers, and build an understanding of the mechanisms by which they are removed from the environment, there remains a substantial knowledge-gap which renders the prediction of a material's biodegradability challenging. This difficulty presents a major bottleneck in the process of reformulation.

Here, I present a unified approach to the replacement of synthetic polymer additives in laundry and fabric care formulations, combining academic and industrial excellence to fully address the scope of the challenge. My PolyForm fellowship will deliver sustainably-sourced polymers capable of high levels of functionality within detergent formulations. I will simultaneously develop new models and tools to assess and predict the biodegradability of new and existing materials, streamlining the process of incorporation of high- performance biodegradable additives within consumer products. These breakthroughs will have impacts far beyond the arena of laundry and fabric care.