Croda nominated for Low Carbon Industrial Project of the Year award at the UK Green Business Awards 2026

Each year, the UK Green Business Awards offer a unique opportunity to highlight some of the most exciting, inspiring, and innovative companies, projects, and campaigns operating in the UK today, while rewarding the many organisations that are striving to build an economy that is sustainable, healthier, and more prosperous for all. 
 
The awards offer 30 categories, covering the full breadth of a green economy that is more critical than ever to the UK's competitiveness, rewarding the most inspiring renewables, energy efficiency, and circular economy projects of the year, as well as the most exciting marketing campaigns, small businesses, and innovations. 

Efficient process innovation

Croda’s work harnessing continuous production represents a step‑change in our sustainable manufacturing. By replacing a long‑cycle, resource‑intensive batch process with a digitally enabled continuous reactor system, the project delivers reductions in energy, water, waste, carbon intensity, and safety risk, while delivering a yield and capacity increase to meet growing global demand. This is achieved through innovative integration of advanced process control, inline analytics, heat recovery, high‑efficiency filtration, and near‑zero‑waste recycle loops. Demand and impact on local resources and communities is reduced whilst delivering growth and supporting local industry.  

This project focuses on scalable, modular, future‑ready manufacturing with clear environmental and local benefits. It showcases strong collaboration across industry, academia, and technology partners, and provides a blueprint for wider adoption, applying smart, sustainable industrial innovation relevant to the UK and beyond. 
 
With many of Croda's products manufactured in large batch reactors, increasing capacity to meet market demand has historically required costly expansion of infrastructure due to the need to adapt existing assets located in constrained spaces on large multi-process sites to deliver higher output, or the consideration of building new plants entirely. These steps are not only expensive but also involve long lead times and can have significant environmental footprints.  

This project originated from a clear and pressing operational need: the growth of Croda’s specialty surfactants portfolio was limited by its scalability challenges. Despite growing customer and market demand, the expansion of Croda’s manufacturing assets, coupled with the company’s strong decarbonisation targets, required significant action. Recognising the strategic opportunity to develop more efficient processes, a multidisciplinary team set out to design a novel continuous process for key products at one of the organisation’s UK manufacturing sites. The ambition was to create a continuous, modular, lower‑energy, lower‑waste production process capable of scaling efficiently.   

To achieve this, the team evaluated technologies outside of Croda, identifying the potential of a NiTech continuous reactor as an alternative to batch production for one of Croda’s key products. This led to a partnership with NiTech Solutions, the Centre for Process Innovation (CPI), and the University of Cambridge’s Institute for Manufacturing, whose expertise in continuous processing, technology commercialisation, and sustainable systems modelling enabled Croda to transform a historically challenging reaction into a robust continuous process. 

Our work to reduce emissions is being informed by our data and captured for our customers in our Product Carbon Footprints (PCFs). Discover more info here.