25 Nov. 2025: The COP 30 conference was the venue for the Net-Zero Industries Mission to announce the National Winners of their 2025 Net-Zero Industries Awards.

The UK winner of the ‘outstanding project’ category was Flue2Chem – with Holmen Iggesund Workington Board Mill, UPM Caledonian Mill, and the Confederation of Paper Industries (CPI) being three of the project partners.

National Winners of the 2025 Net-Zero Industries Award Unveiled at COP30 – Net-Zero Industries Mission

Flue2Chem. The recently concluded Flue2Chem project was a multi-sector project aiming to capture and transform industrial flue gases into chemicals to use as feedstock to manufacture more sustainable household cleaning products.

The project was supported by UK Research & Innovation, with their website providing background on Flue2Chem:

Just under 6% of all the fossil carbon extracted globally goes into chemical cleaning products, so if the UK is to meet its net zero targets, the chemicals industry must find an alternative, more sustainable source of carbon for the wide range of goods that require carbon as a raw material for production.

To address this challenge, UK industrial partners joined forces to research and better understand how fossil-fuel feedstocks could be replaced by carbon captured from industrial gases. Pooling expertise from academia, the foundation industries and the consumer goods sector, the project explored how CO2 from the flues of paper plants could be captured and converted into chemicals that form a key ingredient in consumer products, such as washing detergents.

With £2.7m from the Transforming Foundation Industries (TFI) challenge, the project addressed the technical aspects of capturing and converting flue gas CO2, as well as developing business models that inform the economic incentives likely required from the government to commercialise the ideas.

The alternative sources of carbon currently available for feedstocks – including biomass and deep chemical recycling – are limited in their capacity to meet the billions of tonnes required by the chemicals industry each year, so Flue2Chem investigated the potential of carbon capture and utilisation (CCU).

“CCU is the least well-understood of these alternative processes, so this programme was designed to fill in some of those gaps. We wanted to understand the mechanics of capturing carbon, if and how it could be turned into something useful for manufacturers, and what the economic, environmental, and social impact of those processes would be,” explained Dr Bott (Head of Innovation at the Society of Chemical Industry).
The project focused on developing alkoxylated surfactants – a feedstock widely used in household cleaning products.

Paper companies UPM-Kymmene and Holmen Iggesund Paperboard, alongside Tata Steel (before the closure of its blast furnaces in Port Talbot), delivered waste CO2 captured from their combustion plants. The University of Sheffield developed new technology to remove carbon from the CO2 using pressure swing and a novel adsorbent. This technology progressed from lab scale to 1-tonne/day through work with CCU International.

Different arms of the projects investigated methods for turning captured CO2 into the chemicals required for the surfactant – dodecanol and ethylene oxide. Chemicals manufacturer Johnson Matthey worked with the University of Sheffield and BASF with Imperial College London to explore routes for both chemicals, while the Centre for Process Innovation focussed on making dodecanol using biological routes.

The resulting chemicals were sent to industry ingredients manufacturer Croda to produce a surfactant. The final stage of the programme saw global consumer goods companies Unilever, Reckitt, and Procter & Gamble using the surfactant in formulations for cleaning products, while the University of Surrey developed Life Cycle Assessments of existing and proposed processes to guide the development of this new industrial value chain.

The project delivered a leap in understanding of the technological challenges required to turn this new value chain into reality.

Since the conclusion of the initial project, both Holmen and UPM have continued to explore the practicality of carbon capture from their flue streams and how captured carbon dioxide can be best used.

Flue2Chem was also honoured at the Paper Industry Gold Awards in June 2025, winning the Sustainable Innovation & Net Zero Award. This category recognised innovative projects that are pioneering in the field and that will benefit the future of the industry by making the production process more efficient, sustainable and lower-carbon, while minimising wider environmental impact.