BioBased Europe Science

In keeping with the company’s mission statement... “Safely Cleaning Plant Earth” BIOBASED Europe Ltd is committed to providing its customers with a value – the highest quality products at a competitive price, while strictly avoiding the use of any toxic or hazardous chemistries. SAFE CARE® industrial cleaners, solvents and specialty products are comprised of alcohols, fatty acids, esters, waxes, chelators and other chemical fractions for soy, corn, peanut, palm, linseed, safflower, sunflower, walnut, jojoba and cotton seed.

These very complex compounds are not just the result of blending various chemicals together, where the total was the sum of its parts, but rather the multiplying effect of completely changing the fingerprint of the root chemistries into very powerful irreversible colloids with very unique properties.

Not since the 18th century and the French invention of modern soaps, a mixture of caustic lye and animal fat, had there been a significant improvement in cleaning technology until the arrival of modern colloid cleaners such as sodium lauryl sulphate. They featured hard working, very effective anionic surfactants which became the backbone of most consumer liquid detergents and many home care and personal hygiene products. With the 1970s came vast changes in non-ionic aqueous surfactants, which were better performing hard surface cleaners that could handle a broader range of soil types and were less harsh to cleaning surfaces.

This was about the time that early predecessors of our star surfactant SC-1000™, were first invented to handle industrial cleaning operations such as process metal production, electronics, plastic and coated surfaces. These early formulations had two problematic characteristics that needed to be addressed. Much the way coffee and cream separate when cooled, these early cleaning chemistries often stratified into oil and water phases. Also, while these early chemistries were arguably safer than their forerunners, caustic and petroleum distillates, by today’s much tougher standards they would not pass for environmentally friendly. Key among the offending chemical constituents were terpenes and ethylene glycol monoethylether.

The final form of SC-1000™ was developed which deleted the offending chemicals with more benign fatty alcohols and tall oil which were fully soluble in water, non toxic, and readily biodegradable.

The basic for our cleaning chemistries are colloidal solutions comprised of plant-based non-ionic surfactants that create unique hydrocarbon release agents that can tolerate tremendous soil loads. Our feature products SC1000 Aqueous Cleaner Concentrate, is so powerful that crude oil will be completely lifted from the cleaning surface by only a small amount of SC-1000™ without causing an emulsion or damage to the cleaning surface. Powerful micelle cleaning action causes long chain hydrocarbon soils to virtually repel from the cleaning surface so the soils can be rinsed away with water.

What is a Surfactant?
Surfactants are organic compounds whose molecles consist of two parts: a water-hating (hydrophoblic) part. When a surfactant molecule is introduced into water, the water-hating part tries to escape by attaching itself to any available surface other than water. At the same time, the water-loving part tries to remain in water. As a result, surfactants tend to strongly "absorb" or cling to many surfaces.

When they absorb to a surface, surfactants can loosen and remove the soils from the surface.
When they absorb to soil, surfactants hold soil particles in suspension and help prevent them from redepositing onto the surface from which they have been removed.
When they are absorbed at the water/air interface, they reduce the surface tension of water and allow the water to spread out. Without the use of a surfactant, water tends to "bead up" in droplets. This beading slows down the wetting of the surface and inhibits the cleaning process. Surfactants make water "wetter".

There are 3 types of Surfactants:

Anionic Surfactants have a negative charge and are effective in removing particulate and oily soils.Anionic surfactants react with calcium and magnesium found in "hard" water and usually form an insoluble soap film or scum and generate more suds.
Cationic surfactants have a positive charge and are generally effective as antimicrobial agents.
Nonionic surfactants do not have an electrical charge, therefore they are less affected by water hardness. Generally, nonionic surfactants are low foaming, require less rinsing and are better for waste-water treatment facilities.

What is Colloid?
A colloid, or colloidal dispersion, is a form of matter intermediate between a true solution (like salt dissolved in water) and a mixture or suspension (Italian salad dressing right after you shake it). Further research revealed that colloids have minute particles called micelles. When combined with water, micelles break water's surface tension (the property that keeps water droplets round), resulting in "super wet" water. That same action allows the micelles to penetrate grease, oil and related organic soils and to hold them in liquid suspension. In effect, the micelle cleaning action is unique and can only be related to the effect of an "atomic explosion" where random interaction of the particles loosens the soil.

What is a Micelle?
The surfactants used by Biobased consist of long molecules with two very different types of ends. One end likes water, and is called hydrophilic, the other end likes oil and dislikes water, and is called hydrophobic. When these surfactants are placed in water, the hydrophobic ends attract each other, and repel water, and arrange themselves into a spherical structure with the hydrophobic ends inside the sphere, and the hydrophilic ends on the outer surface of the sphere. This sphere is called a micelle.

The picture to the right is a representation of a micelle. The hydrophilic ends ("heads") of the surfactant molecules are depicted as balls, and the hydrophobic ends ("tails") are lines.

Figure "A" below is a highly schematic illustration of the manner in which the colloid particles called micelles perform in reducing surface tension of water in a very dilute solution. Each micelle is about one ten-millionth of a centimeter (0.000,000,01 cm) in size. Although the physical action is electrical in nature, it is perhaps more readily visualized with the rounded ends as hydrophilic or having an affinity to water. The rectangular ends may be regarded as hydrophobic or being antagonistic to water.

It has been demonstrated that substances such as petroleum compounds, waxes, the more complex alcohols, oil soluble dyes and other substances, which are insoluble in dilute detergent solutions will dissolve in solutions that contain these colloid particles called micelles In laboratory tests the dyne/centimeter surface tension of tap water had been halved by the adding of as little as 1/3250th part of SC-1000™. This may serve to explain why the invention of SC1000™ - allows us to constitute so many solutions from one product that can have the properties of a soap, a detergent, a solvent or other cleaner, and yet be none of these in itself and to do so with so nearly a perfect safety factor.

What about cleaning?
Cleaning is mostly about cleaning different types of hydrophobic (or oily) soils. Why? Because hydrophilic, or water loving, soils are usually easily rinsed off with water. Micelles enable us to dissolve hydrophobic chemistries into water.

The tails of the surfactant like the oil soils as well as they do each other, and begin to orient themselves on the surface of the oily soil as shown in the diagram below. Eventually that small part of the soil lifts off of the cleaning surface and that becomes part of a micelle, thus cleaning the surface.

Two important features of SC1000™ are its reusability and its poor emulsion formation. These two features actually have one single cause: the hydrophobic tails of SC-1000™ readily "let go'' of oils, which then float to the surface of the water where they can be removed. Soils being cleaned
by SC-1000™ are quickly incorporated into micelle structures.

Safety Solvents
The SAFE CARE® Safety solvents manufactured by BioBased are non-polar plant-based solvents which provide the same or higher performance characteristics of traditional halogenated or chlorinated solvents with few or none of the disadvantages. SAFE CARE® Safety solvents include solvents that are water miscible and non-miscible and 100% evaporative and non-evaporative with Kauri Butinal (KB) values ranging from 150 to over 1000.

The SAFE CARE® Safety Solvents do not compromise on their performance by easily exceeding the highest values available for chlorinated solvents such as l,l,l-Trichloroethane, Xylene or Methyl Ethyl Ketone (MEK). Generally, SAFE CARE® safety Solvents are non-reactive with cleaning surfaces including elastomerics such as viton, butyl, nylon, acrylics, HDPE/LDPE, styrenes, urethanes, vinyls and most inorganic paints and coatings.

SAFE CARE® Safety Solvents are derived from alcohols and esters of soy, corn, rice, palm, cottonseed, linseed, safflower sunflower, Jojoba soil, Jatropha, mustard, walnut and almond oils which are all readily biodegradable and non-toxic. The SC-SoIv-Ex| product has been certified as a Clean Air Solvent by the California South Coast Air Quality Management District (AQMD).

Why we don't use...
Petroleum Distillates: Petroleum is a non-renewable resource. The extraction and refining of petroleum causes more environmental harm. Some petroleum-based solvents such a petroleum distillates are central nervous system depressants, and can also affect the liver and kidneys. Petroleum distillates including fuels such as gasoline, kerosene, diesel fuel, and heating oil as well as lubricating oils such as mineral oil, hexane and WD-40.

We invite you to join our team of satisfied customers already "safely cleaning planet earth".
We welcome enquiries world-wide so please contact us on +44 (0)1505 682 978,
Email info@biobasedeurope.com or fill out our Enquiry Form.