European Bioplastics pub­lished a paper on the Indus­tri­al use of agri­cul­tur­al mater­i­als as feed­stock for biobased plastics.

The trans­ition from a fossil-based to a renew­able, biobased eco­nomy is of essen­tial import­ance if the European Uni­on wants to achieve its goal set in the European Green Deal to become cli­mate neut­ral by 2050. This trans­ition requires the col­lab­or­a­tion of the mater­i­als and man­u­fac­tured products sec­tors, and, in par­tic­u­lar, the plastics industry, by using altern­at­ive sus­tain­able feed­stocks, such as biobased feedstocks.

Bioplastics encom­pass a fam­ily of dif­fer­ent mater­i­als that are biobased, bio­de­grad­able, or both. ​‘Biobased’ means the mater­i­al or product is fully or partly derived from bio­mass. ​‘Bio­de­grad­able’ refers to a bio­chem­ic­al meta­bol­isa­tion pro­cess dur­ing which microor­gan­isms avail­able in the envir­on­ment con­vert mater­i­als into nat­ur­al sub­stances such as water, car­bon diox­ide, and biomass.

Using bio­mass for indus­tri­al pur­poses, such as the pro­duc­tion of bioplastics, has major bene­fits. It reduces the depend­ency on lim­ited fossil resources and reduces green­house gas emis­sions. Through the intro­duc­tion of legis­lat­ive frame­work incent­ives, bioplastics can make an import­ant con­tri­bu­tion to the bioeconomy. This is aligned with the Commision’s new Work­ing Pro­gramme and strategies such as the Clean Indus­tri­al Deal. It is also enabling the imple­ment­a­tion of the cas­cad­ing principle.

Play­ing an import­ant role with­in the cir­cu­lar eco­nomy, the bioplastics industry has developed dynam­ic­ally in recent years and has a sig­ni­fic­ant growth poten­tial. Glob­al pro­duc­tion capa­cit­ies for biobased plastics are pre­dicted to grow from about 2.47 mil­lion tonnes in 2024 to approx­im­ately 5.73 mil­lion tonnes in 2029. Main­tained access to sus­tain­ably grown bio­mass is crit­ic­al to guar­an­tee this growth.