Across the UK, local authorities and producers are increasingly interested in bio-based supply chains.
We look at how each region of the UK is evolving its production capacity for bio-based chemicals and products, starting with Scotland, Northern Ireland and the north of England.
Scotland
The Scottish Government is keen to build a vibrant bioeconomy centred around high-value biotechnology, to capitalise on the research output of our world-renowned universities and our highly skilled workforce.
The 2013 National Plan for Industrial Biotechnology envisages that 200 companies will be operating in the region by 2025. Leading the way in implementation will be the 150 companies that make up the Scottish Industrial Biotechnology Innovation Centre (IBioIC), which was set up in 2014 to achieve this aim.
The innovation centre is split across two locations: the FlexBio site, based at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, focuses on de-risking the scale-up of biotech production, while RapidBio, based at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, focuses on improving microbial media through process scale-down and cell line selection.
While the focus may seem on research, Scotland also has an organisation called Bioeconomy Cluster Builder (BCB) which supports Scottish micro and small enterprises (SMEs) looking to develop products and services using biotechnology.
Efforts to increase Scotland’s biobased manufacturing capacity are well embedded in economic policy-making, increasing the potential for scaling up biobased production: for example, the National Plan for Industrial Biotechnology is now part of the National Strategy for Transforming the Economy 2022, a 10-year plan for developing Scotland’s economic potential.
Scotland is already moving towards linking its traditional food sector with industrial bio-based production: the Scottish whisky industry has waste by-products that can be used for multiple purposes in different sectors, such as biogas, and new value chains are being tested in collaboration with the Scotch Whisky Association and the Industrial Biotechnology Innovation Centre. There may be potential for linking whisky waste with the aquaculture industry, another major value generator in Scotland’s agri-food economy.
Scottish companies are already taking advantage of the crossover between agriculture and industry, such as making fermentable sugars from vegetable and food waste to produce higher value-added products. CelluComp is one example of a company working in this space that already operates a bio-refinery. The company extracts fibre from root crops to produce additives for paints, coatings, inks and personal care products.
A growing area of Scotland’s advanced biotechnology industry are precision fermentation plants, which use microorganisms to turn carbon dioxide into biofuels and new proteins. Carbon-based microbial production is still a very nascent field, but Ingenza is one of a relatively small number of companies turning this cheap, abundant gas into industrial enzymes and consumer products.
Northern Ireland
The agri-food sector is a major economic sector in Northern Ireland, but high-value bio-based industrial capacity has historically been limited and the local government is now exploring how to repurpose biomass feedstocks into industrial technologies, particularly circular bio-based manufacturing.
Northern Ireland does not yet have a bioeconomy strategy, but the region’s government has positioned the bioeconomy as one way to grow a sustainable economy under its Green Growth Agenda, a decades-long strategy to balance economic development and the environment.
A circular economy strategy is currently being developed, of which bio-based production is part. An example of an existing company operating in the bio-based and circular sector is BioMarine in Donegal, which develops high-value proteins, minerals and nutritional supplements from fish waste and supplies them to markets around the world.
Cross-border collaboration is key to the development of Northern Ireland’s bioeconomy. In March 2024, Ireland’s flagship bioeconomy project, the Shared Island Bioeconomy fund, provided €9 million to support new sustainable industries in agriculture and marine resources not only in Northern Ireland but across the island of Ireland. The funding will be provided by the Department of Agriculture in the Republic of Ireland and its equivalent government department in Northern Ireland.
North East England
The Industrial Revolution and decline of manufacturing is a central story in the history of the North East over the past two centuries, a history that traces the rise and fall of coal, iron and steel production in Britain.
Renewable materials can meet the challenges of climate change and support social and economic recovery by leveraging the wave of green industrial policies sweeping North America and Europe.
The North East has many resources to support the expansion of bio-based industrial capacity. The North East also has a highly productive agricultural sector with the potential for readily available local biomass. Additionally, the North East, Teesside and the Humber estuary still have a high concentration of UK chemical industry, a legacy of our industrial past. This means there is a local workforce that could be retrained into technical roles in bio-based production lines.
There are also some institutional frameworks in place to drive this forward: materials processing institutes, traditionally focused on mining and metallurgy, can support the transition with their expertise in advanced materials development and innovation, waste reduction and waste utilisation; other sectors have numerous incubators and catalysts.
The biobased sector that has received the most attention so far in the Northeast is biobased construction. At the forefront of this push is the region-based organization Biotechnology in the Built Environment, which is working to increase demand for locally grown and processed biobased construction materials.
In March 2019, the North East received £5 million to build a bioeconomy across Tees Valley, Yorkshire and Humberside. But the post-pandemic slowdown in the global economy has shifted government priorities. The state has abandoned previous efforts to specifically develop bio-based industries and started to redirect funding towards business and innovation that will drive economic growth more broadly.
Yorkshire and the Humber
A story of industrial growth and post-industrial decline is also playing out in neighbouring Yorkshire and the Humber, where some estimates suggest that at least 83% of the jobs once provided by the Yorkshire coalfields have been lost.
Currently, the most obvious way for Yorkshire to participate in the bioeconomy is through biomass production. Lowland agriculture in Yorkshire, Lincolnshire and Cheshire is highly productive.
Increasing the supply of raw materials is essential for the bioeconomy. There will be increased demand for non-conventional crops suitable for multiple industrial uses that are not currently grown on a large scale. The East Riding region in particular has potential for hemp, a versatile and popular bio-based industrial feedstock crop. East Yorkshire Hemp and Carbon Farm is already cultivating the plant, with the latter using regenerative methods to secure a feedstock that meets multiple sustainability criteria.
But producing basic crops can only increase local wealth. The Yorkshire region also needs local processing capacity close to where the crops are grown. Without this, rural areas cannot fully reap the economic benefits of a growing bio-based supply chain. Processed materials will always command a higher price, helping to hedge against price collapses in basic raw materials.
Additionally, there are local initiatives driving demand for bio-based materials: CITU’s Climate Innovation District in Leeds and Native Architects in York recognise that the built environment is a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions today and encourage the adoption of bio-based building materials.
There are already bio-based construction companies in the region: Yorkshire-based insulation manufacturer Thermafleece is a good example of the benefits of bio-based materials, with its British sheep wool insulation being less harmful to air quality than its non-bio competitors.
East Yorkshire Hemp also supplies the construction industry with its “hempcrete” mix, designed for use in timber framing as an alternative to bricks, mortar blocks, cement and plasterboard. The company claims that hempcrete has a negative carbon footprint, in contrast to the carbon-intensive materials of the traditional building industry.
Northwest
The North West of England, like the North East, was a centre of fossil fuelled economic growth throughout the 19th century and has seen large numbers of jobs lost since the 1980s. However, like the North East, the remainder of UK manufacturing is concentrated here, providing the human and organisational potential for new industry in bio-based manufacturing.
The Northeast already has advanced flexible materials production capabilities in the aerospace and automotive industries, and has some of the expertise needed to develop and mass-produce novel biomass-based materials.
Pharmaceutical manufacturing and chemical production are sectors where a shift to bio-based materials could significantly reduce environmental impact, accounting for 20% and 15% of the region’s manufacturing.
Biomass is not a barrier to the growth of the North West’s bioeconomy. In metropolitan areas such as Manchester and Liverpool, biowaste from urban homes and businesses has the potential to become the basis of highly sustainable, circular, bio-based supply chains. In rural areas of Lancashire and Cumbria, forestry waste is abundant but currently underutilised.
Existing bio-based production capacity is small and concentrated in urban areas. Manchester is home to the biomanufacturing research hub of the future. The University of Liverpool’s MicroBioRefinery is pioneering a nascent industry by providing testing facilities to develop new manufacturing routes and functional materials from biological feedstocks.
