Project description
Doing laundry the green way
Everyone loves that fresh out-of-the-washer scent, but this can carry a huge environmental footprint. To provide long-lasting freshness, most commercial laundry products contain fragrance microcapsules which are made from toxic and non-biodegradable materials that end up in the oceans. The European Chemicals Agency says up to 60 000 tonnes of microplastics intentionally added to products like detergents leak into the environment yearly. To help reverse this disastrous trend, the EU-funded EnviroCaps project is developing state-of-the-art biodegradable microcapsule technology. The goal is to to make clothes smell better with these capsules than existing non-biodegradable products currently on the market.
Objective
Getting clothes to smell fresh after laundering and drying is no easy task. To solve this, fragrance microcapsules are now used in all laundry products. They reduce the amount of fragrance in the final product by up to 10 times, and provide long-lasting freshness to clothes during use.
Unfortunately, these microcapsules are made from toxic and non-biodegradable materials which at the end of their lifecycle, accumulate in the oceans, contributing to the global microplastic epidemic.
The European Commission is leading a world-wide effort to eliminate all non-biodegradable microplastics in consumer products, starting from 2022. However, today, there is no biodegradable microcapsule technology and thus, no solution for laundry product manufactures to produce safe and high-performance products.
To solve this problem, Calyxia has developed a game-changing scalable process to produce the world’s first perfectly sealed biodegradable microcapsule technology, EnviroCaps.
EnviroCaps are readily biodegradable microcapsules that are formulation stable and provide an olfactory performance 2 times greater than existing non-biodegradable alternatives. The patented technology has been validated by large actors in the market.
Support from H2020 SMEi2 for EnviroCaps, leveraged by Calyxia investment, would accelerate Calyxia’s access to the international market by transforming a functional microcapsule prototype (TRL6) into an industrial product (TRL9) with over 5000 tonnes EnviroCaps production in 2028 . In 2028, Calyxia will aim to achieve sales of €250 million, representing a market share of 25%, establishing Calyxia to a European and Global leadership position.
To succeed in this ambitious endeavour, Calyxia has assembled a world-leading team of entrepreneurs, expert scientists and engineers, alongside executives from the chemical industry, all united to build a new world of safer, environmentally sustainable and advanced performance laundry products.
Fields of science
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
SME-2 - SME instrument phase 2Coordinator
94380 Bonneuil-Sur-Marne
France
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.