EU Bioeconomy 2.0 – Cultivating a home-grown success

Joanna Dupont, Director of Industrial Biotech and Cross-Sectoral Strategy at EuropaBio, writes in EURACTIV that the EU’s Bioeconomy Strategy, currently under revision, is slowly but surely propagating green shoots of sustainable economic recovery in innumerable and unexpected ways. Plastic packaging for cheese made from milk waste, car tires made from dandelion rubber, bikes made from bamboo, coffee cups made from coffee grounds, car fuel made from wheat straw, T-shirts made from trees: These are just a few of the bio-based products developed in recent years. But while unprecedented progress has been made since 2012 in some areas of bio-based research, innovation and investment, not least as a result of the EU’s €3.7 billion Bio-Based Industries Joint Undertaking, a number of factors have put the brakes on driving commercial success of new products and processes.