The cleaning industry faces soft demand and price pressure

Despite falling-iguana warnings and the record-low temperatures that brought them on, the American Cleaning Institute (ACI) held its annual convention Feb. 2–6 in Orlando, Florida. The conversations this year split between advances in cleaning chemistry and discussions on what makers of cleaning product ingredients must do to persist profitably amid rough conditions in the wider chemical industry.

A wary mood was set by the news the preceding Thursday that Dow would cut 4,500 jobs, more than 1 out of every 8 employees at the storied chemical maker. That sour note was echoed toward the end of the conference in a disclosure by Shell, which hosted a reception on Tuesday night, that its chemical business lost $66 million in the fourth quarter of 2025.

Cronje Grove, senior vice president for strategy and innovation at the chemical maker Sasol, said in an interview that the firm has shifted its mindset from enduring the low point in an economic cycle to adjusting its business model to fit a new normal. Challenges such as high natural gas prices in Europe and soft demand in key markets such as surfactants seem likely to persist, he said. Sasol has shut four manufacturing assets, including production lines that primarily make detergent chemicals, and is evaluating other parts of its portfolio, Grove said.

At the same time, Sasol is investing in new sustainable feedstocks. The firm recently launched a surfactant derived from soldier fly larvae oil. Grove said the C_12–14 alcohol ethoxylate is a drop-in replacement for ingredients usually made from tropical plant oils linked to deforestation. Though soldier flies may seem like an unlikely source of chemicals, Grove said the insects are already cultivated as a protein source for the animal feed market. And the oil has a light environmental footprint because farmers raise the larvae on food waste.

Claims around biodegradability, biobased content, and low greenhouse gas emissions are becoming table stakes for new ingredients in consumer cleaning products, according to Mary Kurian, the global president for care chemicals at BASF. Existing ingredients aren’t being driven from the market en masse, she said. But as brands reformulate around market trends, they’re hesitant to adopt ingredients that don’t have a good sustainability story.

BASF sees opportunity in enzymes and specialty polymers that make detergents and cleaners more powerful per gram. Consumer confidence is down in many parts of the world, Kurian said, and cleaning products are a budget line many households are willing to cut from. Reducing the amount of surfactant needed to make a product effective can lower costs and environmental footprint at the same time, she said.

BASF is also addressing costs by boosting capacity in lower-cost regions. In January, the company started up the steam cracker at its big new complex in Zhanjiang, China, Kurian said, and the rest of the plant will be on line by the end of the year. In November, the firm projected it would complete the project for around €8.7 billion, significantly under the €10 billion budget the firm had when work began in 2022.

Sustainability claims accompanied most product launches at the meeting. In the conference’s Innovation Showcase, four companies presented on biobased polymers, for example. Automatic dish and laundry machine detergents use polymers to combat hard water and soil redeposition. Itaconix CEO John Shaw showed off a dish detergent formulation that uses the firm’s polyitaconic acid both to chelate calcium ions and bind ingredients together in an 8 g tablet, about half the size of existing dish tablets.

The technology licensing firm Soane Materials was also eyeing solid formats with a line of nano- and microfibrillated cellulose materials that can be the basis for thin, dissolvable cleaning sheets. Elizabeth Huth-Helriegel, the firm’s director of business development, said the materials can be tuned to dissolve immediately in a laundry machine or hold together as a wet wipe that then breaks down in sewer and septic systems.

The chemistry start-up Lygos and the big specialty chemical maker Clariant, meanwhile, showcased biobased polymers for liquid formulations. Lygos executive Daniel Almirall said continued optimization of the branching, chain length, and purification process for the firm’s biodegradable aspartate polymers means the firm can now beat the incumbent polyacrylic acid materials as antispotting and antifilming agents in dish detergent. Clariant’s Fabrizio Mazzeo used his time at the showcase to tout the full biodegradability of a soil-release polymer the firm unveiled in the fall.