Chemicals & plastics
Moeve keeps one certified mass balance ledger for its sustainable LAB
Moeve traces vegetable oil from origin to biodegradable surfactants and runs ISCC mass balance for plants in Spain, Brazil and Canada on MARCO.
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One ledger
for certified mass balance across its sites
Mass Balance, Digital Product Passport
The challenge
Moeve is the world's largest producer of linear alkylbenzene (LAB), the base for most biodegradable detergents. In early 2023 it announced NextLab, the world's first LAB made with sustainable raw materials such as palm and coconut oil, using the mass balance approach and with a lower greenhouse gas footprint.
Home care brands buying NextLab need proof that the renewable content is real and responsibly sourced. Palm oil is under close scrutiny for deforestation and human rights, so Moeve had to show where its vegetable oil came from. It also had to keep ISCC-compliant mass balance records across several plants, making sure no sustainability credit was sold twice or allowed to expire unused.
Doing this by hand across plants on three continents meant spreadsheets, repeated checks and slow answers when customers or auditors asked for evidence.
What MARCO does
Moeve went live on MARCO at the end of 2023. The first phase covered NextLab-R, produced at Puente Mayorga in Spain and Camaçari in Brazil, and LAB Low Carbon, produced at Bécancour in Canada.
MARCO traces vegetable oil from its origin to surfactant production. Mass Balance replaces manual bookkeeping: incoming sustainable volumes are booked as credits, allocated to outgoing batches and checked against the rules of the scheme, so double counting and expired credits are blocked. Every record is sealed so auditors and certification bodies can verify it.
Moeve also shares Digital Product Passports with its customers, giving them evidence-backed information on each product's origin, production and sustainability. The platform was configured and integrated with Moeve's existing systems, and training sessions brought each team on board. The main work was aligning MARCO with existing workflows and confirming data accuracy, which the teams handled together through testing.
Results
The project kept to its planned timeline and improved efficiency, reduced costs and increased revenue, while giving customers more confidence in Moeve's claims.
- One ledger for certified mass balance across plants in three countries
- Credits tracked from purchase to sale, with no double counting or expiry
- Product passports that answer customer questions on origin and sustainability
- Use of MARCO since extended to other products in Moeve's portfolio
Moeve now answers customer and auditor questions from the same records it uses to run the ledger, instead of assembling evidence for each request.
I would want to emphasize the adaptability and the customer service from Finboot. The product covers our needs in terms of traceability of our sustainable products portfolio supply chain. We're more than happy with the work methodology applied and the flexibility of the team towards our goals achievement.