Ecover, the Belgian manufacturer of ecological laundry and cleaning products, has been focusing for some time on replacing petrochemical with natural ingredients in its products. Now we want to go one step further in circularity by extracting certain raw materials from residual streams from other industries.
For example, we started the Waste Ethanol from Beer (WEB) project in collaboration with ABInBev. The idea is to test whether we can replace the ethanol ingredient in our detergent formula with waste ethanol that ABInBev obtains from the production of non-alcoholic and poor beer.
We launched the new limited edition detergent with a major, well thought-out advertising campaign. In doing so, we not only wanted to raise consumer awareness of the green story around circular raw materials, but also to elicit an innovative response from the rest of the industry.
Ecover Co-ordination Center
Sectors
WEB is the first project where we use circular raw materials to make the ingredients in our formulas even more environmentally friendly. Clearly, we see the use of circular flows as the next step in our raw materials policy.
Specifically, we have included the further research and implementation of similar initiatives in our business goals for the next 5 years. We have the ambition to use other, more complex ingredients from circular streams in our production in addition to ethanol.