Manufacturers are increasingly seeking high-performance renewable materials to replace carbon-intensive inputs in energy, pharmaceuticals, biotech, and packaging.
Biobased industrial inputs may be more sustainable than their fossil counterparts. Yet to appeal to manufacturers, biomaterials must match or outperform fossil chemicals at a reasonable cost.
3D printing is rising to the challenge, making specialist industrial biomaterials easier to manufacture anywhere, any time, and in small, targeted batches.
We look at how 3D printing can help drive biomaterials adoption in highly specialised industrial niches.
AI in 3D biobased printing
The ability to manufacture highly specialised biomaterials rapidly and cheaply is fundamental to building a more sustainable industrial sector.
3D printing – the printing of 3D objects based on digital instructions – could help make this happen, especially when twinned with artificial intelligence software.
This intersection of AI, biomaterials, 3D printing, and manufacturing is getting attention in the EU currently through a project known as ORGANIC. The industry-partnered research programme aims to develop a platform that deploys AI to print large industrial biobased parts.
Over the next four years, ORGANIC will focus on developing a platform that can print a biobased middle layer for turbine blades. A biobased component like this would make turbines much easier to recycle than they are currently.
Although the project centres around wind turbine components, the ultimate aim is to develop a digital printing platform that can help any sector develop custom low-carbon biomaterials for its own needs.
An end-to-end AI-led biomaterials design and printing platform is still an emerging concept so the project must design its system from the ground up.
One of the most interesting elements of the projects will involve prototyping printing heads fitted with sensors. Coupling the sensors with AI software will allow the printer to self-correct while producing components.
In working at the intersection of 3D printing and biomaterials, the EU is preparing for growth in industrial biomaterials demand.
3D printing facilitates an on-demand, made-to-order business model that delivers niche biomaterials in small batch quantities.
This means that rather than choosing from a limited and generic range on the mass market, clients will be able to order renewable materials to exacting standards.
This emphasis on made-to-order innovation could encourage wider biomaterials adoption in manufacturing sectors, which have exacting performance criteria for their inputs.
AI-led design
The ORGANIC project plans to use AI not just at the manufacturing stage but also at the design phase.
AI can make it cost effective to develop and print products in brand new, niche materials. This is because developers are faced with potentially thousands of industrially useful biomaterials and composites – the R&D needed to identify cost-effective, high-performing, and sustainable options for specific use cases can be capital intensive and time-consuming.
Designing highly specialised and sustainable biomaterials for industry is one area where AI could have immense social value. This project will be a testing ground for whether it can work in practice.
The use of AI to semi-automate the material discovery process should help cut the costs of developing new industrial biomaterials. This is important since certain niche industrial materials will never be in high enough demand that producers will be incentivised to mass produce them.
AI programmes can rapidly explore large numbers of sustainable materials in the digital realm, eliminating the need for costly experiments using physical materials.
The tech promises to make the R&D and testing for biomaterials (and the market price of the finished product) as cost-effective as possible, making innovation less capital intensive for companies.
Printed biobased resins
Similar to the EU’s ORGANIC is Project Nexus, a UK-based industry-academia collaboration to develop 3D printed biobased industrial parts.
Unlike ORGANIC, Project Nexus is working on developing manufacturing equipment for the bioprocessing industries.
Bioprocessing is a manufacturing method where living cells are cultivated to produce chemicals, usually inside vats called bioreactors. Bioreactors are essential equipment for bioprocessing, vessels that house the cells and biological reactions needed to manufacture target chemicals.
Bioreactor components like sensors are almost always built with fossil plastics: polyethylene, polypropylene, polycarbonate, and polyvinyl chloride.
Unfortunately, these plastics bioreactors and their parts are designed to be single use only. This gives a profit advantage in advanced bioprocessing industries, where the purity of the final product is all important – any cross-contamination between batches of microorganisms or enzymes can spell huge losses for the producer.
Bioprocessing is commonly used for biopharmaceutical drugs but also some industrial biomaterials. Globally, the single use bioprocessing market has been valued at $32.52 billion in 2024.
These disposable bioreactors are a disaster from an environmental and waste management perspective, producing a stream of waste plastic that will never biodegrade safely.
This is the problem that Project Nexus is attempting to solve. Industry partners include Photocentric and Sartorius, both industrial 3D printing companies, the biopharma solutions company Metamorphic, and CPI, a manufacturing tech company. On the academic side are Imperial College and the University of Sheffield.
For the next two years, these collaborators will develop and test biobased versions of bioreactors and their components, such as the sensors which continuously monitor what is going on inside the vessels during manufacturing.
The bioreactors that will be developed by the project will be made from biobased resin. These will be tested for use in pharmaceutical R&D and manufacturing.
The project has circular ambitions for its biobased resin bioreactors too. Once they have been used in pharma manufacturing, they can be upcycled for use in the biobased industrial chemicals industry. Pristine chemical purity is not as high a priority in the sector as in pharmaceuticals, allowing for component re-use.
Custom bio-foams
3D printers are usually associated with solid parts but they can also be adapted to work with liquids.
Founded in 2022, Dutch company FoamPrint3D is tapping the possibilities of liquid biobased 3D printing by turning vegetable oil into polymer foams for a wide sweep of industrial applications.
Polymer foams are everywhere in the economy. Most of us encounter them in the form of packaging. Crucial to the global shipping and e-commerce industry, these plastics offer soft, cheap cushioning for fragile goods. Another application is in headphone cushioning.
There are more specialised niches too. As lightweight, pliable materials, they have found uses in aeroplanes or as the spongy interiors of podiatry shoes.
The ubiquity of foam polymers in industry is a huge environmental problem. Most foam on the market today does not biodegrade safely. This means the material risks ending up as microplastics pollution in the soil and water. Recycling is possible but rarely done because it is simply not profitable enough.
To mitigate the foam pollution problem, FoamPrint3D offers clients made-to-order renewable foams that it says are biodegradable and free from harmful additives.
Filling the niche
Biomaterials made from plants or organic waste can have a dramatically lower environmental footprint than fossil plastics.
This is why meeting Net Zero targets will depend on adopting renewable materials in carbon-intensive sectors like construction and packaging.
Yet for these industrial applications, sustainability on its own will not be enough – biomaterials also need to meet a set of exacting performance standards.
FoamPrint3D shows how 3D printing can support industrial shifts to renewables without a loss in performance.
A foam that ends up in sound-proofing will need a very different internal makeup to one destined for ergonomic furniture. Its printing process can precisely control the structure of the foams they produce, meaning clients can demand products with highly specific properties.
Services like FoamPrint3D’s can make it easier for different industries to switch over from ordinary fossil plastics to renewable by bringing down the costs of hyper-customisation.
Driving sustainable choice
Traditionally, 3D printing has been associated with fossil plastics, yet the EU’s ORGANIC, the UK’s Project Nexus, and the Netherlands’s FoamPrint3D show how well it can be easily adapted for use with biomaterials.
Right now, 3D biobased printing is finding a techno-economic niche in supplying specialist industries with custom sustainable materials that will help them meet compliance targets.
The customisable and limited-run nature of 3D printed products is what makes them so unique.
Renewable materials that go into packaging, energy infrastructure, and construction must have precise properties that producers cannot always find in mass-marketed products.
Developing and producing custom materials is an option but it can be a costly process for manufacturers, raising the barrier further for sustainable materials to enter high-performance niches.
3D printing can help speciality biomaterials compete with heavily subsidised fossil chemicals in the exacting segment of industrial materials. This does this because it lends itself to low-volume, specialist production.
Capable of meeting small batch, specialist orders, 3D printing makes the development and marketing of custom biomaterials less risky compared to a manufacturing platform that relies on high market demand to lower per-unit production costs.
Certain industrial biomaterials are so specialist that they will never have mass market demand to bring down production costs. 3D printing fills the gap, offering finely tuned biobased components through a highly nimble mode of manufacturing.