GEMTEK Bio-Based Products

• Year founded: 1991
• Ownership: Private
• Headquarters: Arizona, USA
• Product categories: Solvents, lubricants, and cleaners
• Employees: 100 to 200
• Approximate gross sales: $15 million

GEMTEK Products, first established in 1991 and reorganized in 1998, presently manufactures a broad range of biobased chemicals including cleaners, solvents, lubricants, personal care products, specialty products such as antiallergen solutions, and alternative fuels. All of its products are produced from seed oils, related alcohols, and other materials from soy, corn, canola, peanut, palm, linseed, cottonseed, sunflower, jojoba, and others. In some products the feedstocks are reacted with one another to produce new compounds, such as the nonionic surfactant used in cleaning solutions. Other products, such as lubricants, are blends of refined botanical extracts. The alternative fuels and solvents use a combination of reacted products and refined botanical extracts. In the 1990s, GEMTEK made nontoxic and readily biodegradable chemistries the distinguishing features of its products. This emphasis quite naturally led to its dependence on biobased feedstocks. Having realized the value of biobased chemicals and materials, GEMTEK has become a leader in the promotion of the biobased initiative begun in the United States by Executive Orders 13101 and 13134 and continued by Section 9002 of the Farm Act of 2002. In order to remain distinct from competitors who were then beginning to pursue more or less organic formulations, GEMTEK elected to define its own market more strictly. GEMTEK decided that its products should have the following characteristics:

• Readily biodegradable
• Nontoxic
• Nonreactive
• Nonflammable
• Plant based
• Low in volatile organic compounds
• Of minimal manufactured origin
• Free of genetically modified organisms
• Temperature stable
• Ability to be used for long periods
• Free of the following:
  1. Corrosive chemicals, such as caustic or sodium metasilicate
     Silicones or petroleum distillates
     Known or suspected carcinogens or substances judged to be toxic to mammals and aquatic organisms, such as glycol ethers, aldehydes, ketones, borates, terpenes, and synthetics
  2. Ecologically harmful chemicals, such as phosphates, nitrates, sulfonates, and phenolics

In addition to strict adherence to the policy on chemical safety, GEMTEK requires that the products perform to similarly high standards.

The company relied upon commercial sources for established surfactants, fatty acids, lubricant additives, and solvents until it was able to begin to identify capable raw resource channels from small farm cooperatives (most are smaller than 1,000 acres) in major producer states in the United States, such as Nebraska, Kansas, Arkansas, the Dakotas, Iowa, and Ohio. Loose alliances with agriculture schools as well as chemical engineering and chemistry departments helped the company to develop early formulations before it was able to start its own developmental laboratories in the mid-1990s in Hayward, California, and Phoenix, Arizona. By turning to biobased formulations, GEMTEK became one of the pioneers opening a new market segment of highperforming, nontoxic, readily biodegradable products. The company then focused upon improving performance overall while keeping manufactured costs low and having a high level of testing accountability.

From fewer than 20 products in 1991, GEMTEK had developed more than 140 products by 2000, divided into five categories: cleaners, solvents, lubricants, specialties, and alternative fuels. By 2000, the combined company production of biobased products exceeded 6 million pounds, about half that being lubricants and fuels. As the biobased initiative began to expand in 2001 as a result of U.S. Executive Orders 10131 and 10134, followed by Section 9002 of the Farm Act of 2002, and similar efforts at the state level, GEMTEK responded by acquiring premium-priced blanket contracts in feedstock oils and related alcohols such as ethanol, ethyl lactate, and ethyl esters in the Midwest and overseas markets such as the Philippines, Malaysia, and Australia.

During the early 1990s, there were many products sold by competitors with inflated claims and very little supporting data, according to contemporary industry periodicals such as Happi and Soap and Cosmetics. In the opinion of GEMTEK, some firms even compromised their product formulations with a variety of toxic substances. With few federal or state guidelines on the use of phrasing about environmental or human safety, most manufacturers offered similar claims that their products were beneficial for environmental and human health, even for inorganic and sometimes highly toxic substances. GEMTEK continued to restrict itself to products that were naturally derived and nontoxic and maintained a high level of human and environmental safety. Indeed, by 2000, the company adopted the motto