Читать книгу Biosurfactants for a Sustainable Future - Группа авторов - Страница 88

In recent times, the developments of the “bioeconomy” have been promoted by most of the world's developing and developed countries. The bioeconomy policies and strategies have been formulated by the scientific communities to reach this sustainable goal. A strong support for this thoughtful concept was provided by the Global Bioeconomy Summit organized in Berlin in the year 2015, which gave the chance to the bioeconomic experts and stakeholders from more than 50 countries to come together and discuss their critical views on a stated smoldering topic. In the summit, it was declared that nothing has a unified definition of the bioeconomy. However, experts agreed on a common understanding of the bioeconomy as the “knowledge‐based production and utilization of biological resources, innovative biological processes and principles to sustainably provide goods and services across all economic sectors.”

In the present review article, authors thoroughly studied the bioeconomy of biosurfactants production and utilization. With more and more stringent regulations on greener processes and catering to the huge demand, biosurfactants form a major share of the surfactant market. The global biosurfactant market in 2013 was 344 068.40 tons and had been expected to reach 461 991.67 tons by 2020, growing at a CAGR of 4.3% from 2014 to 2020 [73]. Revenue generation of the biosurfactant market was found to be over $1.8 billion in 2016 and is expected to reach $2.6 billion by 2023 (540 ktons by 2024), with the rhamnolipid market set to witness a gain of over 8% [74]. Some other market research reports showed the global biosurfactant market at over 5.52 billion by 2022, at a CAGR of 5.6% from 2017 to 2022 [75]. At the present time, Europe is rising and is projected to prolong to rise as the biggest market (nearly 53%) followed by the United States, mainly due to stricter regulatory guidelines in the region. In the meanwhile, the growing wakefulness and infrastructures in Asian countries is making them a rising consumer of biosurfactants. With the detergent industry leading the product application sector, sophorolipids among all different type of biosurfactants were found to have the largest global market share. The Germany‐based company BASF and Belgium Company Ecover have emerged as the top two biosurfactants producers in the surfactant market. Some other prominent companies involved in biosurfactant production and supplies are MG Intobio, Urumqui Unite, Saraya, Sun Products Corporation, Akzo Noble, Croda International PLC, Evonik Industries (Germany), Mitsubishi Chemical Corporation, and Jeneil Biosurfactant [74, 76]. On the other hand, in spite of the huge market demand, biosurfactant production is not as competitive as its synthetic counterparts. Therefore, economizing the biosurfactant production process assumes significance in order to sustain the market for these compounds in the current environmentally fragile scenario and long‐term sustainable development.