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Detergent dilemmas

Surfactant manufacturers don’t seem very happy these days. Surfactants are active ingredients used in cleaning detergents.
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And recently, the government’s been mulling over discouraging foreign raw materials to protect the local industry. But this good gesture is giving them nightmares.
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What’s going on, you ask?
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Well, saturated fatty alcohol or SFA is a kind of surfactant that commonly goes into making detergents. And most of it is imported because India doesn’t produce enough of it to cater to the large surfactant-absorbing industry which includes personal care products like soaps, skin cleansers, shampoos, stain removers and more.
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And India’s needy surfactant industry is almost like a golden opportunity for other countries that produce low-cost SFAs and send them over. In other words, they just dump their cheap products in India.
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In 2017, the government started looking into the alleged dumping of SFAs from Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Saudi Arabia. These imports were actually leaving harmful residues that polluted local land and water. And because they had sufficient evidence to prove their speculations, the commerce ministry’s investigation arm thought of choking such hazardous imports with anti-dumping duties.
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And folks in the surfactant industry never okayed this move because discouraging imports meant having to procure SFAs locally. But since there isn’t enough potential to meet all this demand, production costs will naturally rise. And eventually, trickle down into pricier detergents and shampoos for consumers.
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Another trouble could be with importing something called SLS (Sodium Lauryl Sulfate) which is a byproduct of SFA. If duties are imposed only on SFAs and not on other surfactants like SLS, it will make the local surfactant industry uncompetitive. Because some detergent manufacturers might simply resort to importing cheaper SLS as a workaround, bypassing buying SFAs from Indian surfactant makers altogether. This could compel them to resort to cutting back on expenses triggering layoffs. That could threaten the jobs of nearly 9,000 people employed in the industry too.
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And that’s more or less why folks in the domestic industry are urging the government not to make this backfiring move.

Via Finshots