A shampoo, a toothpaste and a floor cleaner have more in common than the shelf they sit on.
Each contains synthetic polymers that thicken the liquid, hold the mixture together and control how it feels, and many of those polymers are made from petrochemicals and end up in water systems as microplastics.
Regulators have started closing that off, and formulators need replacements that behave the same way at a similar price.
Biological alternatives exist and have historically been too expensive, or too difficult to blend into an existing formulation, to be used at consumer-product scale.
was founded in Bengaluru in 2023 to make them cheaper.
