From Food Waste to Shampoo!

Surfactants… Ever heard of them? We don’t blame you if you haven’t. However, we assure you: you have certainly used and even eaten them today! Surfactants are functional and indispensable ingredients in your everyday products such as your shampoo, your toothpaste, your toilet cleaner, your face cream, your hand soap, your laundry detergents. Even the ink in your pen and the foam on your coffee are the way they are due to the presence of surfactants. Surfactants are literally everywhere and without them our daily lives would look very different.

Regrettably, these indispensable chemicals rely heavily on petroleum and palm-oil feedstocks, with harsh and energy intense production processes being required to convert them into the foamy, degreasing or cleaning products you like to use. So, clean hands do not necessarily correlate with a clean environment.

At AmphiStar, we are changing how these essential products are made and from which resources. We set out to take a radical turn away from traditional production methods. We use bio-based waste and side streams such as leftover food from supermarkets as feedstocks and convert them through a mild biological fermentation process similar to brewing beer or wine into functional, safe ingredients that power the products you use every day. Ecover has already launched a power cleaner containing our food waste based biosurfactant to market.

By eliminating petroleum and palm oil-based feedstocks, we not only reduce harmful environmental impacts such as CO2 release from fossil fuels (crude oil is best left where it is, deep in the earth) and deforestation related to the use of palm oil but also avoid energy intensive and polluting chemical processes. Moreover our products are safer; this means no toxic/carcinogenic byproducts in your toothpaste, face cream, or shampoo. Our innovative, bio-based approach helps protect the environment while delivering safer, sustainable solutions for consumers like you.

Join us in our mission to make biosurfactants mainstream and about revolutionizing the surfactant sector; or in other words, making everyday products better for you and the planet—vote for AmphiStar, where sustainability meets everyday functionality!