The Sirius effect:

We don’t always appreciate how much nature is embedded into our lives. Mother nature is inventive and clever when it comes to functional designs. This is where many architects, engineers and chemists get their inspiration.

For example, the Triodos building in the Netherlands is designed to facilitate communication and be as environmentally friendly as possible.  The interior of the building is designed after a mushroom’s lamella –and the theme of mycelia (the underground, nearly-invisible net of fungi) which form symbiotic networks, and enrich the forest from the bottom up, is a suitable one for a bank based on ethical investments.

Other times, the impact comes from understanding how nature makes things work. 

A murmuration of starlings can seem to change directions all at once, and for years people have wondered, “How do they do that?”  As complicated as it may seem for a thousand birds to fly together in unison, this behavior can be modeled using only a few parameters. These parameters can be readily translated into other applications, such as those for self-driving cars, swarm robotics, and even particle physics.

Nature also influences many of Sirius’s products. Nature provides sustainable, biodegradable, building blocks, that we can then build into larger compounds. Sugar, for example, is wonderful in tea, but the carbon ring is also the basis for the ethoxylated end of our ethoxylated fatty acids. The fatty acid chain is derived from sustainable palm oil.

The end result is an effective surfactant that is the molecular equivalent to those produced using petroleum, but sustainably produced and fully biodegradable.

Sirius’s Britase enzymes are extracted from special cultivated non-GMO bacteria. And while self-cleaning cars and floors might sound like a science fiction dream, the use of friendly, beneficial bacteria found in probiotics can make this a reality.

Who knows where the next innovations will come from?  Maybe the movement of sea anemones will lead to a breakthrough on how to sift microplastics out of the water.  Or perhaps we will finally find a completely biodegradable optical brightener.

Whatever we think of, though, it is likely that nature has already come up with a way to do it better. Preserving nature isn’t just good for polar bears and penguins.  It’s good for us, too. 

© Copyright Sirius International Detergents BV | Sirius International Water Treatment BV

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