On improving the climate change impact of surfactant-based cleaning products: Were you aware of the potential impact of fragrances?

Life cycle assessments of home and personal care consumer products, carried out in the last 20 years, have provided insights and disclosed blind spots that prompted product developers to make significant changes in product format, formulation, and packaging, leading to more sustainable consumer products. However, fragrances are often overlooked in terms of interconnectedness with key environmental footprint parameters of consumer products. In this article we show that fragrance ingredients could be relevant for reducing the climate change impact of the full consumer product, defined as Global Warming Potential at 100 years (GWP100), and at the same time drive olfactory differentiation. To illustrate this, a comparison was drawn between the GWP100 for typical surfactants commonly used in the European market and the GWP100 for fragrance ingredient proxies, using in both cases GWP100 data extracted from the literature. Fragrance proxies were synthesized using two methods: a continuous flow process (scenario 1) and batch-type processes (scenario 2), representing optimal and non-optimal synthesis approaches, respectively. The findings revealed that fragrance ingredients synthesized through less efficient processes could approach the environmental impact of surfactants. The article delves as well into the complexities posed by fragrance concentration, solubilization, and fragrance delivery in the development of novel sustainable formulations.