Across the UK, regional authorities and producers are deepening their interest in biobased supply chains.
We look at how capacity in biobased chemicals and products is evolving in each UK region, beginning with Scotland, Northern Ireland, and northern England. For part II, covering the Midlands, the South of England, and Wales, click here.
Scotland
The Scottish government is keen to build a thriving bioeconomy centred around high-value biotech to leverage the research output of its world-renowned universities and highly skilled workforce.
Its National Plan for Industrial Biotechnology from 2013 stated there should be 200 companies operating in the area by 2025. The main axis of implementation are the 150 companies that make up Scotland’s Industrial Biotechnology Innovation Centre (IBioIC) established in 2014 to fulfil its aims.
The innovation centre is split between two locations. The FlexBio site, hosted at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, focuses on de-risking the scale-up of biotech production. RapidBio, hosted at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, focuses on microbial media improvement through process scale-down, cell-line selection.
The focus may seem research-heavy but Scotland also has what’s called a Bioeconomy Cluster Builder (BCB) that supports Scottish micro-companies and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) looking to develop products or services that use biotechnology.
Scotland’s drive to build up its biobased capacity is well-integrated into its economic policymaking, making biobased production more likely to scale. For example, the National Plan for Industrial Biotechnology is now an arm of the 2022 National Strategy for Economic Transformation, a 10 year plan to develop Scotland’s economic potential.
Scotland has already moved towards linking traditional food sectors with industrial biobased production. Scotland’s whisky industry holds waste byproducts that could have multiple uses across different sectors, including biogas, and new value chains have been tested under a collaboration between the Scotch Whisky Association and the Industrial Biotechnology Innovation Centre. There may be potential for link-ups between whisky waste and the aquaculture industry, another large value generator in Scotland’s agri-food economy.
Scottish companies have already been exploiting crossovers between agriculture and industry, such as by producing higher-value products from vegetables and food waste into fermentable sugars. CelluComp is an example of a company working in this sector that already operates biorefineries. The company extracts root vegetable fibres to make additives for paints, coating, inks, personal care products, and more.
A growing wing of Scotland’s advanced biotech industries are the precision fermentation plants that turn carbon dioxide into biofuels and novel proteins using microbes. Carbon-based microbial production is still a very early field but Ingenza is one of the relatively few companies turning this cheap and abundant gas into industrial enzymes and consumer products.
Northern Ireland
Northern Ireland’s agri-food sector is a major economic sector. However, higher-value biobased industries have so far been limited in capacity with the regional government now exploring ways of diverting its biomass feedstock into industrial technologies, especially in circular biobased manufacturing.
Northern Ireland does not yet have a bioeconomy strategy but the region’s government has identified the bioeconomy as one path towards growing a sustainable economy under its Green Growth Agenda, a multi-decade strategy for balancing between economic development and the environment.
It is currently in the process of drafting a circular economy strategy, with bio-based production a part of this. An example of an existing business that works in the biobased and circular sector is Bio-Marine in Donegal, which has developed high-value proteins, minerals, and nutraceuticals from fish waste for markets across the world.
Cross-border collaboration is important to Northern Ireland’s bioeconomy development. In March 2024, Ireland’s flagship bioeconomy project, the Shared Island Bioeconomy fund, offered €9m to support new sustainable industries around agriculture and marine resources not just in Northern Ireland but throughout the island of Ireland. The money comes from the Department of Agriculture in the Republic of Ireland as well as the equivalent Northern Irish government agency.
Northeast England
Industrial revolution and the decline of manufacturing is the central narrative of the Northeast’s history over the last two centuries, a history that tracks the rise and fall of coal, iron, and steel production in the UK.
Renewable materials could now support social and economic revival that meets the challenges of climate breakdown and capitalises on the wave of green industrial policy sweeping through North America and Europe.
The Northeast possesses many of the resources that could support expanded biobased industrial capacity. The northeast also has a productive agricultural sector meaning local biomass could become readily available. Moreover, the Northeast, Teesside, and the Humber estuary still hold a high concentration of the UK’s chemical industries – a legacy of its industrial past – meaning a local workforce that could be potentially retrained for technical roles in biobased production lines.
It also has some of the institutional frameworks in place to drive this. The Materials Processing Institute which focused on mining and metallurgy traditionally could support the transition with its expertise in developing and innovating in advanced materials, waste reduction, and waste use. Other sectors have a number of incubators and catalysts.
The biobased sector that has so far received most attention in the north east has been biobased construction. At the forefront of this push is the organisation the Biotechnology in the Built Environment organisation headquartered in the region and trying to boost demand for regionally grown and processed biobased construction materials
In March 2019, the northeast received £5 million to build the bioeconomy across the Tees Valley, Yorkshire, and Humberside in 2019. However, a slowed global economy after the pandemic changed government priorities. The state began diverting financial support towards businesses and innovations that foster economic growth more broadly, abandoning the previous push to nurture biobased industries in particular.
Yorkshire and the Humber
The story of industrial growth and post-industrial decline has also played out in neighbouring Yorkshire and the Humber. Some estimates say that at least 83% of jobs formerly offered by the Yorkshire coalfield have been lost.
Currently, the most obvious way for Yorkshire to participate in the bioeconomy is through biomass production. There is high productivity agriculture in the lowlands of Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, and Cheshire.
Increasing raw materials supply is essential for the bioeconomy. There will be growing demand for unconventional crops suited to multiple industrial applications but that are not grown at scale currently. In particular, the area of East Riding has potential for hemp, a versatile and sought-after biobased industrial feedstock crop. East Yorkshire Hemp and Carbon Farm already grows the plant, with the latter using regenerative practices to ensure a feedstock that ticks multiple sustainability criteria.
Yet basic crop production can only increase the wealth of a region so far. The Yorkshire area also needs local processing capacity near where crops are grown. Without this, rural communities cannot reap the full economic benefits of the growing biobased supply chain: processed materials will always fetch a higher market, helping hedge against price crashes in basic raw materials.
Then there are regional activities driving up demand for biobased materials. The Climate Innovation District by CITU in Leeds and Native Architects in York are encouraging adoption of biobased architectural materials, recognising that the built environment is a huge source of greenhouse gas emissions today.
Biobased construction companies in the region already exist. Yorkshire-based insulation manufacturer Thermafleece is a good example of the benefits of biobased materials, with their British sheep’s wool insulation less harmful for air quality than their non-bio competitors.
The East Yorkshire Hemp company also serves the construction sector with its ‘Hempcrete’ mix designed to be used with timber frames, a replacement for bricks, mortar blocks, cement, and plasterboard. It claims that its Hempcrete is carbon negative in contrast to the highly carbon intensive materials of the traditional building sector.
Northwest England
Similar to the Northeast, the Northwest of England was central to fossil-fuelled economic growth over the 19th century, with heavy job losses after the 1980s. Yet like in the northeast, what remains of the UK’s manufacturing clusters here, giving it the human and institutional potential for new industries in biobased manufacturing.
On top of aerospace and automotives, the northeast already has capacity in advanced flexible materials, giving it some of the background expertise required to develop and mass-produce untried biomass-based materials.
Pharmaceutical and chemical manufacturing are both sectors that could substantially cut its ecological impacts by shifting towards biobased materials and account for 20 and 15 % of the region’s manufacturing.
Biomass is not a constraint on the growth of the northwestern bioeconomy. From the major centres of Manchester and Liverpool, urban residential and business bio-waste could be the foundations of a highly sustainable and circular biobased supply chain. In rural stretches of Lancashire and Cumbria, forestry waste is abundant and lies underutilised today.
Existing biobased capacity is small and concentrated in the cities. In Manchester, there is the Future Biomanufacturing Research Hub. Liverpool University’s MicroBioRefinery is pioneering a still-emerging industry by offering testing facilities to develop new manufacturing routes and functional materials from biological feedstock.
