Most raw materials used in the bioeconomy begin life in rural areas. For the most part, however, the countryside is still not seeing the full economic benefits of advanced biobased industries.
Cities still tend to claim the lion’s share of capacity in the higher-value bioeconomy, playing host to sectors like biotech and industrial chemicals. Meanwhile, rural communities are left behind by a sector that depends ultimately on their land and labour for feedstock, either crops or agricultural waste.
To build an equitable bioeconomy, we need biobased supply chains that bring as much value to rural communities as possible.
We look at the EU projects working to rectify the rural-urban divide in the bioeconomy at different scales, ranging from small-scale value chains to national ones.
Why are rural areas less likely to capitalise on new biobased industries?
Rural workers and businesses tend to participate in the bioeconomy largely as biomass providers. They struggle to capture a larger slice of the wealth generated further down the supply chain by service workers and owners of enterprises in value-added goods.
This is ironic since the abundance of space and biomass available means rural areas could become prime locations for new businesses and processing capacity.
What benefits could rural areas gain from biobased industries?
Establishing biomass processing capacity can help farmers and other rural primary producers achieve more revenue, diversify incomes, and hedge against price fluctuations in particular crops.
Rural areas usually have all the right elements to host complete end-to-end biobased value chains. This could make these regions more self-sufficient by reducing reliance on external suppliers for key goods. Where economic decline is a key issue, well-planned biobased value chains could become a way of revitalising regions that have historically suffered from underdevelopment and urban migration.
Wealth is more likely to be kept in rural areas if biobased capacity is under local ownership – for example through local private forest owners or local common forests.
Encouraging rural innovators
The EU has come in for some criticism in the past for its lack of attention to meaningful rural development in its bioeconomy policy. In response, the EU included in its updated bioeconomy strategy in 2018 that it would focus on ‘the deployment of inclusive bioeconomies in rural areas’.
Despite recognition of the problem of low bioeconomy buildout in the countryside, higher value rural bioeconomies remain rare. Most farmers still sell exclusively into the food and agriculture markets rather than the chemicals or materials sectors.
However, the bloc now has a few initiatives in place to encourage higher-value biobased activities in rural areas around the continent and to link them into complete value chains.
One of these is Bio-rural Europe. Part research project, part accelerator, it recognises the current limits of biobased capacity in rural areas and looks for existing biobased value chains that could be developed further.
Their objective is to assess the state of the rural bioeconomy (right now dominated solely by food and agribusiness) to see how bridges could be built between these and the novel, high-value biobased solutions in the highest-value sectors of the bioeconomy, such as green chemicals and high-performance renewable materials.
The project picks out rural entrepreneurs with ‘ingenious bio-based solutions’ in food & Agriculture, forestry, Aquatic and Water Systems, Bioenergy, Bioproducts & Biomaterials. Select candidates are put forward to participate in the European Bioeconomy Challenge, where they get to pitch to key stakeholders.
Bio-rural also offers support to potential entrepreneurs and interested regional policymakers by publishing their research online. It offers up detailed factsheets on a myriad of bioeconomy topics and online tutorials on different bioeconomy sectors, giving a wide-ranging introduction to those new to the sector but interested in putting biomass to use.
A key online resource that Bio-Rural is developing are business blueprints to guide the design of rural bio based value chains, due to be available online in 2025.
Strengthening existing regional value chains
The EU SCALE-UP, a recent project to drive community-based bioeconomy development is trying to realise the bioeconomy potential of six rural areas across Europe in Northern Sweden, the French Atlantic Arc, Upper Austria, Strumica and Andalucia. All these regions have negligible bioeconomies today relative to the huge biomass resources that they contain.
The focus of SCALE-UP is to forge ties between all relevant stakeholders in the biobased value chain, from biomass producers to civil society and government, formulating sustainable business models that are acceptable to these diverse groups and that are adapted to local problems and capacities.
Scaled rural bioeconomies for consumer supply chains
BioRural and SCALE-UP focus on small enterprises and shorter value chains. A third EU rural bioecoomy project BRILLIAN, funded by the Circular Bio-based Europe Joint Undertaking, supports biobased value chain-building on a national scale.
BRILLIAN validates ten existing biobased value chains in Italy, Denmark, and Spain, in a bid to encourage more vertical integration of circular, biobased, and value-added operations in locations around where the biomass is collected, for example, by setting up facilities for pretreating biomass near the fields they are grown.
The focus is on building scaled supply chains that provide enough volumes of treated biomass to satisfy larger consumer retail companies while still giving rural communities a greater share in the bioeconomy.
Working closely with the project are downstream businesses needing more biomass supply to expand their renewable offerings or are entering biobased materials for the first time.
Three ways to prepare potatoes
One biobased value chain that BRILLIAN is analysing and revamping is located in Spain and centres around the humble potato. Once the potatoes leave the farm gate, they get to Paturpat, a key project partner.
Paturpat is a steamed and processed potato food company based in Vitoria, Spain, Paturpat makes ready-to-eat vacuum-packed products in supermarkets. It is a cooperative business that was set up in 2016 through a collaboration between an agricultural cooperative, a work cooperative, and a credit union.
Right now, Paturpat’s revenue comes from a simply-prepared food product with a stable market. However, they now want to diversify their revenue using the 450 tonnes per year of potato waste it produces each year.
The company joined the EU’s BRILLIAN to develop new ways of processing and marketing waste material by constructing a biobased value chain that squeezes the maximum value from all components of the potato.
A well-designed biobased value chain will split into multiple branches at several points as feedstock gets transformed into multiple higher-value products at once, destined for different markets.
In the new business model devised under BRILLIAN, a large portion of Paturpat’s potatoes will still end up in the shops as food but the starch byproduct that builds up during the steaming and processing gets sold on for further refining for the chemical and cosmetics industry.
Starch is the highest value byproduct of the potato value chain because the material can be used in feedstock for the chemicals and cosmetics industries. The chemical industry can turn potato starch into thermoplastics and one project stakeholder interested in this form of valorisation is Aitiip, a plastics company branching out into biobased materials, as well as Tecnotp.
Finally, any leftover from this starch extraction process gets turned into animal feed, constituting the third and final branch of the new BRILLIAN potato value chain.
The bioeconomy’s development promise
Commentators have argued that the bioeconomy has the potential to offer a more geographically well-distributed range of jobs compared to the fossil economy.
The centralised nature of the oil industry owes to the way petroleum deposits are found in isolated, fixed locations. By contrast, biomass and agricultural activities are more evenly spread, meaning that the bioeconomy would have a more decentralised structure where many clusters of processing plants are located around many sites of biomass harvesting.
The EU already acknowledges that this decentralised structure gives the most desirable model for bioeconomy development, “where at least the first transformation of biomass takes place as close as possible to the biomass provisioning area”.
In practice, the bioeconomy does not automatically distribute its economic benefits evenly. This is borne out by current spatial patterns where higher value biobased processing sites are much more likely to be located in and near urban areas.
Like all value chains, biobased ones must be consciously designed to ensure it does not prop up uneven patterns of development that leave rural communities out.
There are still many barriers to building out ecosystems of biobased farms and refineries in rural areas. These include high capital requirements, the installation of complex technologies and the need to train a specialised workforce to operate them, cooperation with technology providers, sales channels, and developing optimised short and sustainable logistic chains.
This complexity and high cost is what motivates the EU to engage with a range of regional stakeholders in their rural bioeconomy projects. Establishing value chains needs cooperation between farmers, those who convert feedstock, end-buyers, as well as rural policymakers with support and guidance permeating through different scales, from individual entrepreneurs to whole regions.
