The chemistry has to be right

You want to build a tower out of building blocks. When you have reached the highest point, someone comes and takes a block from the centre. The tower collapses. Something like this can happen in the search for suitable, sustainable ingredients for products. As soon as everything seems to be stable and suitable, there are new scientific findings: The production of a basic substance has a worse ecological balance than previously known. The tower topples and the search starts all over again.

This is part of the daily work of the Research & Development (R&D) department, one of dalli’s central specialist areas. What may sound like a Sisyphean task is intentional. dalli has made the 360° assessment of the advantages and disadvantages of ingredients a guiding principle. Only a holistic evaluation of a formulation can enable a finely balanced relationship between effectiveness and quality.

Sustainability with chemistry

Two terms that seem to be diametrically opposed. However, the dalli laboratories are proving that it is possible to create a functioning unit from both. To this end, the dalli researchers have committed themselves to two maxims:

Degradability and defossilisation

Degradability means that a product should biodegrade in the sewage treatment plant after the consumption cycle in the household. This was achieved, for example, in the development of a machine and crockery cleaner. The polymers (= chemical compounds consisting of molecular chains) used in its manufacture are biodegradable after the cleaner has been used. This is a big step, as polymers usually end up in sewage sludge, which ultimately has to be incinerated because it is unsuitable as a fertiliser, for example.

Defossilisation means moving away from chemicals that are obtained using or from fossil fuels such as crude oil (Latin fossilis = dug up). Fossil resources are finite and their extraction is often ecologically damaging. Therefore, a central task of R&D is to find suitable alternatives. This is the challenge that the R&D “Raw Materials Group” is successfully meeting. It scans and observes the market, analyses trends, searches specifically for innovations and checks whether the alternatives are suitable for the manufacturing process.

However, it is not only the internal specifications that determine the chemical composition of a product. The product must also fulfil the customer’s requirements before it finds its way onto the shelf. This primarily concerns those ingredients that must not be included because they have not scored well in Stiftung Warentest analyses, for example. This would lead to poor ratings – and these usually have a direct impact on customers’ purchasing behaviour.

The work of R&D therefore has a major influence on how sustainable dalli products ultimately are. Numerous top rankings from Stiftung Warentest demonstrate that the researchers are successful in this work. Private-label products manufactured by dalli are almost always rated better there than branded competitors.