The science of biomaterials is advancing rapidly. New renewable materials are being developed all the time that could replace carbon-intensive materials in industry.
Keeping up with new material innovations can be difficult, so we’ve made it easier: we review seven exciting studies that have come out of the biomaterials space over the past year.
1. Moss that mops up oils
Researchers in China have modified sphagnum moss into a biobased adsorbent that removes oil from water.
The new moss material reportedly improved on existing biobased options for oil-cleanup.
Previously, scientists have experimented with biobased oil adsorbents made from other biological feedstock, including wheat bran, corncobs, pomelo peels, cotton, orange peel and lemon grass.
Yet these natural materials fell short on a number of crucial criteria. The moss material in this study reportedly offers higher adsorption capacity than previous innovations, plus reusability. The researchers claimed their tests show that the material maintains over 90 percent of its starting capacity, even after it is used through 10 cycles.
Both of these features make the material potentially much more cost-effective – less of it is needed to clean the oil out while the initial cost is spread out over multiple uses.
Unlike many previously developed biomaterials, the moss material showed a higher water-repellence, meaning it rejects water effectively. This overcomes a major problem with biobased oil adsorbents: usually, plant materials attract water, an unhelpful property when the aim is to soak up oil and leave behind clean water.
Biomaterials can be a sustainable way of removing contaminants from the environment. As they tend to be made from biodegradable compounds, using them in natural environments does not come with a risk of causing further environmental harm, unlike certain chemical treatment methods.
2. Bacteria make circular clothing
Making the clothing industry more sustainable is essential to meeting climate and ecological goals. Most fabrics contain fibres based on petrochemicals and only 0.3% of global textiles are circular, leaving tens of millions of tonnes of toxic clothing waste in landfills each year.
In January 2025, UK researchers published a new way to make some common textiles more circular. Known as man-made cellulosic fibres, these are the third most produced textile fibres on the planet: viscose, Lyocell, cupro, and modal.
Today, most of the cellulose used in making these fabrics are taken from wood pulp. This may sound like they are good for the environment. However, 30 percent of the wood pulp to make cellulosic fibres come from ancient and endangered forests, making the sector highly destructive to biodiversity and natural carbon stores.
Viscose production is also problematic for the solvents it uses to transform the wood pulp into textiles. Toxic chemicals are often required.
The study presented a way to use enzymes and bacteria to convert mixed waste into a biobased feedstock for textile production. They call it bacterial cellulose.
Published in the Journal of Cleaner Production, the study details the upcycling process. It starts with textiles, agricultural residues, and municipal solid waste. All of these materials contain cellulose but at too diffuse a concentration to be useful without some cost-effective process for extraction and purification.
Enzymes digest the cellulose in the waste textiles, turning it into glucose. Bacteria then get to work converting the glucose, converting it into virgin-quality bacterial cellulose.
By cutting out virgin wood and toxic chemicals from the fibre production process, we are left with a material that has a much lower environmental footprint.
Importantly, the study verified the sustainability credentials of its method, using a life cycle assessment that compared their new approach to mainstream cellulose fibre manufacturing. It found that their material did better on several sustainability metrics: land use was only 10 percent of the conventional method while it also cut back on freshwater pollution.
3. Rice-based adhesive
Adhesive fills our consumer and industrial landscape – few consumer products do not use them. Unfortunately, the vast majority are derived from petrochemicals.
Developing high-performing adhesives without any petroleum has proven to be a tricky task for scientists, but biobased researchers continue to improve on prototypes.
One advance in biobased adhesives was published in Chemical Engineering journal last year. Scientists from Korea showcased a 100 percent biobased adhesive based on starch nano-particles. The material is reportedly comparable to petrochemical products in terms of adhesion strength.
The basic raw material for the nanostarch was protein from rice powder, with additional materials sorbitol and glycerol.
This rice-based adhesive is meant for ordinary applications where we make things stick with just a little pressure application – think plasters – showing the power of biobased innovations that make everyday objects greener.
4. Does sustainability pay?
Recently, a literature review on sustainability certification schemes for biobased products was published in the Journal of Cleaner Production. It asked whether sustainability labels on biobased products have a positive or negative impact on the biomaterials industry.
It found that the economic impacts of certification are largely positive for biobased producers. On the whole, the costs that companies face in getting sustainability claims authorised by regulatory authorities are outweighed by the revenue increases that follow.
This is because sustainability labels tend to increase consumer appetite for biobased products. In some cases, it even encourages them to pay a price premium over ordinary, more polluting options.
The social sciences are often overlooked when it comes to building a biobased economy. But insights from these disciplines are essential to scaling renewable materials. Delving into the economics of biobased production and understanding consumer behaviour can help identify industry challenges and how to overcome them.
5. Self-healing bio-roads
This biobased innovation could be the solution to road potholes.
UK researchers have incorporated tiny biobased ‘encapsulents’ smaller than a strand of human hair into an asphalt mix, creating a road material that can heal its own cracks as they form.
The encapsulant, taken from the species Lycopodium clavatum, is filled with a biobased oil taken from pine bark. The oil releases into the road once the asphalt begins to crack. Microcracks on the surface heal in less than an hour.
The technology was designed with the aid of artificial intelligence, helping the researchers understand how both asphalt binders and biobased oils behave at a molecular level and interact with one another.
These biobased road spores offer up a brilliant example of how seemingly arcane biotech capabilities can fix ordinary problems. In the UK, potholes are estimated to cost £143.5 million a year in the damage they cause.
6. Plastic-absorbing squid bone
Microplastics pollution is one of the most urgent public health issues of our time. Decades of plastic production have filled our soil, water, and oceans with an estimated 4.6 billion metric tonnes of these toxic particles. Their long term health effects are still unknown.
Tackling microplastics must target the root cause: this means dramatically reducing petrochemicals production. Yet we also need tech that can mitigate the damage already done.
A group of researchers led by Wuhan University’s Hongbing Deng have been trying to tackle microplastics clean up, developing a new biomaterial just for that purpose.
The material is a new biobased foam that absorbs almost 100 % of microplastics in water on its first use.
The material, a reusable and biodegradable biopolymer, was tested in still water as well as samples from lakes, the coast, and agricultural irrigation pools. The raw materials used to make the plastic-absorbing polymer are among the most common materials found in nature: chitin and cellulose. The material tested in the study used chitin taken from squid bone and cellulose taken from cotton.
The researchers said they hoped for pilot production followed up by large-scaled commercial production if testing went well.
7. Biomaterials and their environmental impact
Biomaterials are an essential to building a sustainable economy. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) specifically mentions wider biomaterials adoption as a key part of mitigating climate change. This is because biomaterials often surpass their petrochemical equivalents on many measures of sustainability including lower carbon emissions.
Yet as with any industrial activity, biobased materials can have some negative impacts on the environment.
Recent research has shown that certain biobased fibres can harm earthworms, an essential part of sustaining soil health.
Another study released last year showed that microplastics from bioplastics harm water fleas – a key part of aquatic food systems.
The impact of bioplastics on wildlife still needs more research, as well as industry and policy focus.
We must fully understand the impact that renewable materials have on the environment to properly mitigate risk and develop safer materials that live up to their sustainability promises.
