The floral scent of your body wash may be chemically based. This driver tries flowers instead

At Bridge Farm Group in England’s Lincolnshire County, rows and rows of roses, petunias, and marigolds fill the company’s 60-acre glasshouse. Around 90 million such plants will arrive at retailers across the UK — but not all will be sold. Now, researchers are finding a way to turn otherwise wasted flowers into produce perfumes, through a collaboration between the farmer, Unilever, and the University of Nottingham.

Whether due to fluctuating demand or quality issues, thousands of ornamental plants (including flowers and potted plants) go unsold every year. That amount of waste could exceed 990 million tonnes a year, Unilever said, based on data from Bridge Farm and the UK’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. While some of those flowers may end up being donated or composted, Unilever’s experts wanted to explore ways to reuse the flowers.

Unilever makes both home and personal care products, from Sunlight dishwashing liquid to Dove body wash. In general, the artificial fragrances of these types of materials are mainly derived from petrochemicals. This pilot, in contrast, will use natural ingredients extracted from discarded flowers to create the product’s fragrance. “Crops that do not make this grade still have important functional benefits,” said Neil Parry, head of biotechnology at Unilever, in a statement.

To do this, scientists combine two methods of extracting flower aromas: Soxhlet extraction and ultrasonication extraction. In the Soxhlet method, the flowers are heated in an extractor, which extracts the essential oils from their leaves. That’s a common way to extract essential oils, but it usually takes a while—24 to 48 hours. To speed up the process, they will also use ultrasonication in Nottingham labs, where sound waves disrupt cell walls. With that added feature, it takes just 20 minutes to extract compounds, and it ends up being more powerful. (Unilever said it’s too early to tell what specific products the fragrance might eventually find its way into, but it plans to test the oil’s use in some of its home and personal products.)

The pilot is in the early stages, and is starting with oils from petunias, roses, and marigolds. “If we see encouraging results,” Parry said by email, then Unilever will conduct a life cycle and economic analysis “to understand the feasibility and constraints of using plant and flower waste in our fragrances on a limited scale.” If it works, using essential oils from flowers can help decarbonize our everyday products.