nir-vana innovation network

A Dutch SME produces a complete range of washing and cleaning products for the private label market and is an important international player, with customers in several European countries. It also serves the cash & carry wholesale and industrial market. The company invests in the future by increasingly focusing on the production of ecological and skin-friendly and sustainable detergents.

Chemical waste is worldwide a major problem, also in the Netherlands. To protect the environment waste should be re-used as much as possible to close life-cycles and reduce the use of chemical substances and natural sources.
Grinding the granulated detergents to fine powder is undesirable because fine powder cannot be reused by the company for quality product reasons. Besides most of their detergent laundry powders contain coated enzymes which form a health issue, if during grinding, the coating is destroyed and people inhale its dust from the grinded granulate.
In detergent powder production, during mixing, lumps are formed in specific mixers when applying liquid surfactants to the powder. A part of these lumps do not break-up to form powder but remain whole. After the mixing process the detergent powders are transported through an oscillating sieve (3mm) to filling machines. The coagulated detergent powder lumps (3 - 40mm) stay behind on the sieve deck as a residual stream that is collected in big-bags. They are too big to be used as a detergent powder. In fact these waste lumps are a very rich detergent (high surfactant percentage). But there is no application for it. On a yearly basis the amount is around 50 tons.

The company is looking for technologies, applications, methods or other ideas to cope with this residual stream that remains after sieving their produced detergent powders.
The company is willing to conclude a technical cooperation agreement, but there is a scope for discussing other forms of cooperation and agreements.

IMPORTANT: This technical cooperation request refers to an innovation challenge published on the internet platform. If an organization expresses interest before closing date, it will be guided towards this open innovation platform. After registration participants can browse free through other submissions and engage in discussions. All submissions will get feedback by the company on this open platform.
The challenge opens on November 8th and closes on December 13th. 2021 Mind that posts on this platform are not confidential. Beside open discussions on the platform, sharing of confidential information will be made possible on demand. After that, the organization will select from the chat active SME's, the SME's with whom they would like to cooperate in the development of a solution. Once the challenge is closed, Expressions of Interest for this technology request will be treated in the traditional way.

Advantages & innovations

NETHERLANDS

Stage of development

Available for demonstration

Partner sought

The company is looking for technical partners, SMEs, inventors and academia who combine creative thinking with knowledge of: - Processing of detergent waste; - Extraction processes and methods; - Filtration techniques - mixing or granulating technology know-how to handle this type of residual streams -Tech & design. -Process technology. -Circularity mind set: improving circularity of resources in industry and society. The company offers: •Co-creation in setting up the business case for the partner’s concept. •Create products by combining the technology/solution with existing solutions. •Probability of a follow-up order or lasting cooperation. •Possibility to spread the concept if it is demonstrably effective to the Dutch or EU association of detergent producers. The Dutch SME is open for a cooperation under a technical cooperation agreement, but there is scope for discussing other forms of cooperation and agreements.