A Sweet Result

Good quality, low prices, and reliable delivery are three must-haves for companies that market chemicals and other industrial ingredients to sophisticated buyers. But what about a favorable life-cycle assessment?

Danisco, a Danish food ingredients and enzymes company, contends that product sustainability is gaining in importance to the multinational food manufacturers that are among its biggest customers. And armed with a new life-cycle assessment, or LCA, Danisco claims that producing the sweetener xylitol via the firm's unique process has much less impact on the environment than making xylitol the conventional way.

Xylitol is a polyol that offers the sweetness of sucrose with 40% fewer calories. It is used in low-calorie goods, products for diabetics, and chewing gums, for which it boasts the ability to inhibit plaque.

Xylitol was developed in Finland during World War II, when table sugar was in short supply. Danisco acquired Cultor, Finland's main xylitol producer, in 1999. Today, with xylitol plants in Finland, the U.S., and China, Danisco calls itself the world's largest producer of the sweetener.

The Danish firm is also the only producer to tap a waste stream from the pulp and paper industry as its feedstock. In Europe, Danisco obtains this xylose-rich side stream in Austria from a pulp mill run by Lenzing. Stéphane Constant, executive vice president of Danisco's sweeteners division, explains that the stream's xylose is extracted at an adjacent facility run by Danisco.

Purified xylose is sent to Danisco plants in Finland and China, where it is hydrogenated to produce xylitol. The side stream, meanwhile, is sent back to Lenzing and burned for its energy value. Danisco employs a similar process in the U.S., Constant says.

Most of Danisco's competitors are in China. According to CCM International, a market research firm based in Guangzhou, China, Chinese production capacity for xylitol more than doubled from 2005 to 2009 to reach 88,000 metric tons per year. Shandong Futaste Pharmaceutical is the largest Chinese xylitol producer, the research firm says, with 40,000 metric tons of capacity. China supplies about 50% of the world xylitol market, according to CCM estimates.

Although some Chinese firms produce xylitol via fermentation, Danisco's LCA focuses on competitors that use the biomass hydrolysis route. In this process, corncobs, which can contain more than 25% xylose, are broken down via acid hydrolysis. Xylose is extracted from the resulting hemicellulosic hydrosylate, purified, and hydrogenated to form xylitol.

The LCA, conducted by EarthShift, a Vermont-based sustainability consulting firm, found that the wood-based process for making xylitol has a much lower environmental impact than the corncob route. In 15 categories, such as aquatic acidification and terrestrial ecotoxicity, Danisco's process has at most 16% of the environmental impact of the competing process, the study found.

Danisco's Constant attributes the lower impact to lower use of chemicals, raw materials, and energy and to a reduced waste burden on the environment. He adds that Danisco's chromatographic separation consumes less energy than the separation method used in China. Shandong Futaste didn't respond to C&EN's requests for comment on the study.

According to Constant, the xylitol LCA is one of the first undertaken by Danisco as part of a new strategy to become the "first-choice supplier" of its customers around the world. To help implement the strategy, Danisco employees have been quizzing customers about what they want from the firm.

"When we asked the food and beverage companies, we heard about health benefits, cost savings, and the like," Constant says. "But more and more, we heard that their customers—retailers like Walmart and Carrefour—are looking for something else." Those big retailers, he says, don't want the products they stock to harm the communities and countries where they do business.

Although Constant doesn't mention it, Danisco might have had another reason for embarking on the LCA. At the time, the firm was confronting increased competition in the xylitol market—a result of the product's growing success as a sugar substitute for candies, gums, and dairy products.

As Chinese xylitol output grew in recent years, prices started falling. Today, the sweetener sells for about $4.00 per kg, one market source says.

In March 2009, Danisco announced actions in response to declining profits in its sweeteners business. The company mothballed a corncob-based xylose plant in Anyang, China, and reduced production at its xylitol plant there.

Since then, the xylitol business has improved, Constant reports. "Last year was tough, but we have come out much stronger," he says. Danisco now runs its Chinese xylitol plant with wood-based xylose imported from the U.S. and Europe.

As for the extent to which the LCA will differentiate Danisco from the competition, Constant notes that the firm has just started sharing the study with customers. But he is confident that they will embrace it, if only because of the emerging priorities of their own customers in the retail sector.

"The Walmarts and Carrefours and Metros of the world are putting pressure on suppliers to come up with more sustainable products," he says. "So far, we are happy that most customers see positively that Danisco is making sustainability a tangible benefit for them."

The call for sustainability, however, is far from universal. Eric Kort, a manager at KIC Chemicals, a New Paltz, N.Y.-based distributor of Chinese xylitol and other products, says his firm's customers are mainly interested in price and quality, not green credentials. "We sell hundreds of products, and no one has ever brought it up," he says. With xylitol, Kort adds, the most they ask for is that it be derived from non-genetically modified corn.

Timothy J. Greiner, a partner at the sustainability consulting firm Pure Strategies, agrees that most companies' sourcing concerns are pragmatic. "Today, price, delivery, and quality drive most decision-making," he says. "Sustainability can be a tie breaker."

But that attitude is changing. Niche companies, such as the green household products maker Seventh Generation, already pay more for sustainably sourced ingredients, Greiner notes. "Even your major brands are increasingly becoming focused in this area," he says. "They are interested in understanding where their ingredients come from and what the sustainability story is behind those ingredients."

The gum maker Wrigley, for example, says it welcomes efforts by suppliers to better understand the life cycle of the products they make. "The sustainability of ingredients is very important to Wrigley as it is key to building a sustainable business, and we're committed to selecting sustainable ingredients and suppliers," Rob Peterson, the firm's chief innovation officer, tells C&EN.

Constant acknowledges that the favorable LCA doesn't mean Danisco can charge what it wants for xylitol. But as governments start considering environmental impact when they regulate and tax industrial ingredients, Constant sees the cost scale tipping in favor of products such as Danisco's.

"The competition model is going to change," he says. "What happened in the past is not going to be valid for the next 10 years. Sustainable technologies will be the cost-effective technologies of the future."