A Dutch company and a Spanish waste manager are scaling up plants that turn plant sugars, household organic waste and sewage sludge into plastics, coatings and fertilisers.
A sports T-shirt made from plant-sugar plastic and a biorefinery making compostable bag materials from urban waste are among the bio-based products set to be shown at the Global Bioeconomy Summit 2026 in Dublin, the European Commission informed in a release on Friday.
The summit will also feature items including a hemp-framed scooter and asphalt made with wood lignin.
Europe needs to move away from fossil resources and see more everyday products made from bio-based materials, Professor Kevin O’Connor of University College Dublin said.
Europe could use “food processing side streams, unavoidable food wastes and side streams from agriculture” to help transition away from the fossil economy, he added.
The Circular Bio-based Europe Joint Undertaking (CBE JU) will have a stand at the summit and will include food products that can be tasted, according to the statement.
CBE JU is a €2 billion public-private partnership supporting projects linked to the circular bioeconomy — an approach that uses renewable biological resources and waste to make products and energy.
Biomass production and conversion employed about 17 million people in the EU in 2023 and generated €863 billion in added value, new figures cited by Europe’s skills ambitions need a regional lens show.
From lab to market
A key hurdle is scaling technologies from research into commercial production, O’Connor said.
“Universities are creating solutions, but we need to scale up technologies to bring the research out into industry,” he added.
One exhibit is linked to Avantium, a Dutch company working on a bio-based plastic called PEF (polyethylene furanoate) for bottles, films and fibres.
The material is made using FDCA (2,5-furandicarboxylic acid), produced from plant sugars.
The EU-funded PEFerence project supported construction of what Avantium described as the world’s first commercial-scale plant producing FDCA, and the plant’s first batch was announced on 28 September. Commercial sales are expected by the end of the year.
Avantium’s flagship plant in Delfzijl uses starch left over from wheat used for protein in foods as a feedstock, Ingrid Goumans, a chemical engineer responsible for public affairs at the company, said.
An EU grant also helped the company attract an additional €20 million in private investment for the site, which is designed to produce 5 kilotonnes a year.
Avantium has agreements with more than 20 companies planning to use PEF from the plant, including Henkel, Dutch supermarket chain Albert Heijn and cosmetics manufacturers.
In Spain, Urbaser has built a biorefinery in Zaragoza that turns household organic waste and sewage sludge into products including biopolymers for compostable bags and agricultural films, fertilisers and soil improvers, and coating materials. The work was backed by the EU-funded CIRCULAR BIOCARBON project.
“The first necessary change is to stop viewing organic waste simply as something that needs to be disposed of and start seeing it as a renewable urban feedstock,” Dr Eduardo Fernández Giménez, Urbaser’s innovation director, stated.
Cost remains a barrier because bio-based materials can be more expensive than fossil-based products, Dr Sven Wydra of Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research said.
Scaling up can improve efficiency, and regulations designed for fossil-based industries can also create barriers, he added.
Regions are likely to take different approaches depending on local resources, including forestry residues in Scandinavia such as bark, sawdust and branches.
Building local value chains can require new collaborations between sectors such as farming, forestry and chemicals, Wydra said.
