Galaxy Surfactants wins ICIS innovation award

Mumbai-based surfactants and speciality chemicals firm, Galaxy Surfactants, has bagged the ICIS innovation award in the best process category for its novel, environmentally friendly process to produce N-acyl amino acid surfactants.

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N-acyl amino acid surfactants are mild anionic surfactants which find use in personal care products, providing cleansing as well as sensory benefits. Traditionally they are produced in a two-step synthesis – preparing a fatty acid chloride by halogenating a fatty acid in the presence of a catalyst, and then condensing this fatty acid chloride with an amino acid under typical Schotten Baumann conditions. However, there are challenges in isolating the fatty acid chloride from the catalyst reaction mixture and moreover the catalyst used – dimethyl formamide (DMF) – is a toxic material.

Galaxy’s brainwave was to catalyse the first step by using an amino acid surfactant as the catalyst in a semi-heterogeneous process, so that it is not necessary to isolate the catalyst before moving on to the second step.

The advantages are several: the process uses a completely degradable and non-toxic catalyst; the separation issues (distillation/crystallisation/ phase separation) are eliminated – reducing batch time and giving significant savings on energy and waste disposal; the overall process is “green”, with the closed loop process causing no emissions to the environment; and the odour of the product is improved (due to elimination of DMF).

Galaxy estimates the market for N-acyl amino acid surfactants to be around 113,000 tonnes/year and growing rapidly. Between 2013 and mid-2018, some 15,000 consumer products containing this type of surfactant have been launched on to the global market. The innovation has recently been recognised by major personal care products.