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At Lubrizol, we understand that the environmental footprint of our ingredients begins before the raw materials arrive from our suppliers and continues after our ingredients have shipped. By aligning with United Nations Sustainable Development Goals 14 and 15, we not only seek to understand and reduce the impact of Lubrizol’s beauty and personal care ingredients on water and land, but to partner with suppliers and customers to help them achieve their environmental performance both for their company and in their formulations. Ingredients that provide the environmental performance Compass Benefit are ingredients that, at some point in the product life cycle, reduce the products environmental impact. Learn how Lubrizol is taking action to lower environmental impact throughout the value chain.
Reducing impact begins with understanding how the building blocks of our ingredients interact with the environment.
By finding ways to reduce the footprint of our manufacturing, we pass on the positive impact to our ingredients.
Enabling our customers with technology that helps to reduce their environmental impact. Here are a few examples:
Understanding the ultimate fate of our ingredients in finished product use means that we help consumers reduce their impact.
Lubrizol Life Science offers beauty and personal care ingredients that are kind to the environment, even after they are used in finished products. Lubrizol Life Science offers select performance ingredients that allow for biodegradable formulations, for more information on our ingredients biodegradability profiles- please contact your Lubrizol representative. The Carbopol polymers used in most of Lubrizol's wash off personal care ingredients are efficiently captured in waste water treatment and never reach the marine environment. In addition, these polymers are not classified as PBT (Persistent, Bio-accumulative and Toxic). Learn more.
Most of Lubrizol’s Natural botanical ingredients are made though the process of extraction. Unlike other methods of obtaining botanical ingredients, extraction does not involve a chemical transformation and preserves the natural content of the botanical.
Lubrizol’s Warwick Chemicals facility in Mostyn, Wales is a world leader in making TAED, an efficient bleach activator for laundry detergent. Warwick uses a thermal oxidizer to process waste, which generates 10% of the site’s steam needs. When Warwick converted from conventional boilers to cleaner natural gas to power that process, it also provided natural gas to the local community for the first time. Warwick also has reduced the steam and power needed to make its ingredient by capturing and reusing evaporation energy three times using a continuous automated separation process.
Lubrizol’s manufacturing facility in Paso Robles, California has taken action to reduce and reuse wastewater in water-stressed California. Before 2016, the Paso Robles facility sent all waste water to the city sewer system. In addition, the plant drew all of the water for its cooling tower from the city water system.
In 2016, the plant began collecting its effluent wastewater and processing it in a reverse osmosis system rather than sending it to the sewer system. The processed waste water is now used in Paso Robles cooling tower, instead of using water drawn from the city water system. This water reuse project has resulted in reuse of nearly 250,000 gallons of waste water per year and also significantly reduced the plant’s draw of incoming water from the city.
Lubrizol’s manufacturing plants in Calvert City, Kentucky and Kallo Belgium are the largest sites for the manufacture of powered grades of Lubrizol’s Carbopol ingredients. Recently, the plants have made changes at these sites that have reduced they cycle times during the manufacturing process. Reduced cycle times mean that the sites use less energy, water and steam in making these high volume rheology modifiers. As a result, Lubrizol estimates an average reduction of 27% in water use and 27% in energy savings. per Kg of powdered Carbopol.
Prior to 2016 Lubrizol shipped its Carbopol product from its Calvert City, Kentucky plant in packaging that used excess cardboard. The design of the box sometimes resulted in damage to the packaging, as well as generated more waste, from damaged product and packaging, at the customer site. In 2016, Lubrizol redesigned the packaging for Carbopol, to use boxes that were more durable and used less cardboard. In addition to preventing product and packaging damage, the new boxes reduced solid waste by more than 500 metric tons per year.
With a RCI of .80, Lubrizol’s Noverite™ LD 920N not only provides high natural content, but significantly reduces environmental impact when used to make finished laundry detergent. Lubrizol’s home care customers have used an annual average of 900,000 fewer gallons of water, 17% less energy and reduced CO2 emissions by an average 1000 MT per year when manufacturing with Noverite LD 920N. Lubrizol’s unique chemistry enables our customers’ improvement on these key environmental performance indicators by delivering superior dispersion, even in cold water processing.