How does European bio-based industry foresee its future?

The EU’s Bioeconomy field is set to considerably change through a newly set up public-private partnership of Bio-based Industries. This partnership represents the outcome of the recently launched Joint Technology Initiatives (JTIs) established by the European Commission, member states and European industry stakeholders.

There are five set-up JTIs and they will be established under new legislative proposals:

• Bio-based industries (BBI): Aiming to make greener the everyday products through renewable natural resources and innovative technologies;
• Fuel Cells and Hydrogen 2 (FCH2): Promoting the utilization of clean and efficient technologies in transport, industry and energy.
• Clean Sky 2 (CS2): Intending to develop cleaner aircraft by reducing its CO2 emissions.
• Innovative Medicines 2 (IMI2): Aiming to  develop the next generation of medicines, treatments and vaccines.
• Electronic Components and Systems (ECSEL): Intending to boost Europe’s electronics manufacturing capabilities.

Established under the 187 Article of the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU (TFEU),  JTIs embrace challenging, strategic research agendas, based on Horizon 2020 programme’s objectives and aim to provide funding for large-scale, longer-term and high risk reward research. JTIs bring together various actors from different fields: industry, universities, SMEs, research organizations and all other actors interested in research and innovation challenge.

What does bio-based industry aim to do?

The bio-based Industry acknowledges the necessity of Europe’s transition towards a post-fossils society, whose economic growth will be decoupled from resources’ depletion and whose development will highly take into account the environment’s preservation. Moreover, the Industry aims to make a major contribution to the EU’s economy, in order to create a European world-leading bio-economy, which will not only use the renewable raw materials in an efficient and sustainable way, but it will build new and innovative value chains, re-industrialize and revitalize the rural areas, boost competitiveness and therefore create sustainable growth.

Up to 2030, the Bio-based Industry established the following objectives[3]:

• Achieving Europe’s re-industrialization by creating a new rural infrastructure of refineries: in this regard, BRIDGE aims to  substantially contribute to the developing of  a competitive and knowledge-based rural European economy, based on biorefineries , which should create up to 400 000 new skilled jobs by 2020 and 700.000 jobs by 2030;
• Diversify farmer’s income and provide them with additional margins by up to 40% by either better utilizing or putting back into production 15 percent of the land which is currently under-valued up to 2020 and 35 percent of the land up to 2030;
• Significantly increase the utilization and applications  of  by-products and wastes from various bio-based sources such as agriculture, forestry, waste water treatment, sludge, organic household waste, yard waste, food processing waste and alike; the current un-used by-products and wastes amount to 2.8 billion tons per year; new technologies and capabilities will allow this potential to be increased by 15 percent up to 2020 and 25 percent up to 2030;
• Contributing to the industrial development of bio-based chemicals, biomaterials and advanced biofuels: therefore,  BRIDGE  aims that 20 percent of the chemicals and materials production in Europe to be bio-based produced up to 2020 and up to 2030 the bio-based chemicals and material production to reach 30 percent. Moreover, the industry intends to achieve to supply 25% of Europe’s transport energy needs by sustainable advanced biofuels by 2030.
• Achieving a new generation of bio-based materials and composites produced in biorefineries which will develop better components for industries applications (automotive, packaging, construction and more). In this regard, BRIDGE aims that up to 2020 the market supplied by bio-based polymers and composites (at comparable quality-price ratio compared to the fossil alternatives ) to be 5 times higher than now and up to 2030 to be 10 times higher.
• Contributing, through protein isolation and valorization from additional biomass processing, to reduce the imports of protein by 15 percent up to 2020 and 50 percent up to 2030. In the same vein, BRIDGE intends to boost the optimization of soil fertility programmes in order to slash by 10 percent the imports of fertilizers’ components (as phosphate and potash) up to 2020 and by 25 percent up to 2030.

Strengthening, upgrading and up-scaling the development of the European Bio-based industry will trigger both highly favorable economic, social and environmental consequences. Thus, it is expected that the turnover and employment of the bio-based industries to grow by at least 10 percent, resulting in 3 million supplementary jobs, € 80 billion increased turnover and bill reduction of EU oil imports up to € 24 billion. At the same time, the value chains based on sustainable biomass production, along with a sustainable management which will allow to capture the carbon in bio-based products such as bio-plastics, paper products and construction wood will heavily contribute to the reduction of greenhouse house gas emissions, the preservation of biodiversity and ecosystems and food security improvement.

All in all, the European bio-based industry can remarkably contribute to maintain  Europe in the world economy race whereas favoring the transition to a post-fossils economy coupled with significant social and environmental consequences. Huge challenges, but huge rewards as well.

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