Consumer products like textiles, detergents and cosmetics can harm the environment by discharging chemical products into the environment during production, use and disposal and impact our CO2 emissions. One potential way to diminish the hazards caused by consumer goods is to replace the chemical reagents used in industrial processes by enzymes to manufacture these products. The use of novel and improved enzymes in cosmetic ingredients, liquid-based detergents, and in textile processing could reduce the CO2 emissions by about 42 million tons per year.
In spite of the fact, that enzymes covering these activities exist on the market, very few consumer products contain enzymes as these existing enzymes are expensive or show low performance. ‘‘Enzymes that meet the consumer demands for high performance and stability, and at the same time are environmental friendly and cost-efficient need to be developed using cutting-edge technologies. Developing such innovative enzymes is one of the major goals of Eucodis in this FuturEnzyme project’’, Dr. Jan Modregger, MBA, Head of Research and Development at EUCODIS Bioscience points out.
The FuturEnzyme project is led by a team of researchers around Manuel Ferrer from the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), and the consortium consists of 16 European academic and industrial partners from Spain, Germany, Italy, Austria, Portugal, United Kingdom and Switzerland. EUCODIS Bioscience participates in all the following stages, the characterization of the candidate enzymes, their improvement through engineering techniques and implementation low-cost production methods to pre-industrial scale trials. FuturEnzyme has started in June 2021 and will run until 2025. The program has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 101000327.
More about EUCODIS Bioscience...