to rise as the biggest market (nearly 53%) followed by the United States, mainly due to stricter regulatory guidelines in the region. In the meanwhile, the growing wakefulness and infrastructures in Asian countries is making them a rising consumer of biosurfactants. With the detergent industry leading the product application sector, sophorolipids among all different type of biosurfactants were found to have the largest global market share. The Germany‐based company BASF and Belgium Company Ecover have emerged as the top two biosurfactants producers in the surfactant market. Some other prominent companies involved in biosurfactant production and supplies are MG Intobio, Urumqui Unite, Saraya, Sun Products Corporation, Akzo Noble, Croda International PLC, Evonik Industries (Germany), Mitsubishi Chemical Corporation, and Jeneil Biosurfactant [74, 76]. On the other hand, in spite of the huge market demand, biosurfactant production is not as competitive as its synthetic counterparts. Therefore, economizing the biosurfactant production process assumes significance in order to sustain the market for these compounds in the current environmentally fragile scenario and long‐term sustainable development.
4.11 Conclusion
This chapter reflects detailed information on the utilization of biosurfactants as a potential substitute in the heavy metal ions bioremediation process from the polluted environment. Designing the new strategies and technologies is the need of society in order to minimize the biosurfactant production cost at a commercial scale and make the production process economically competitive. The biosurfactants formation costs can be decreased by lowering the number of agro‐industrial mistakes and the waste that treatment uses up. Agro‐industrial waste‐based biosurfactant generation renders another option for cheap and commercially viable biosurfactant production. For various applications, biosurfactants moved to generally regarded as safe (GRAS) microorganisms like lactobacilli and yeasts, which have astounding promise. However, significantly more research is now required in this field.
The production and commercial scale application of biosurfactant molecules remains a testing subject, as the planning of an irrefutable item is influenced by various key factors. For the utilization of biosurfactants in various areas, the rules and directions should be detailed. It is very much expected that in the near future such types of microbial strains have been synthesized using genetic engineering techniques that large‐scale production using crude materials as well as their industrial scale application will be possible. In terms of lowering the cost of biosurfactant production, these discussed strategies could prove to be the most economical ones. A stricter positioning of these structures is, therefore, an authoritative step toward production enhancement, production procedure economization, and establishing an economically competitive and successful biosurfactant market, as well as addressing the solid waste disposal issue by efficient conversion of low‐cost solid industrial and agricultural waste into revenue generating value‐added products.
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