The UK government has pledged to raise R&D funding to 2.4% of GDP within 10 years, but perhaps more importantly, they have announced a separate funding outlet in the form of the “Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund”. This £725m fund will allow the government to directly invest in sectors and projects where it believes the UK has the potential to drive global development. One such sector is “biotechnology”, particularly in the bio-based chemicals and biopharmaceuticals sectors. The Government has also committed to Clean Growth (The Clean Growth Strategy) with the intention to maximise economic growth and minimise environmental impact. This is being coupled to the Resources and Waste strategy (UK Industrial Strategy and Defra 25 Year Plan to improve the Environment).
The Bio-economy is a large part of the UK economy supporting key industries and generating significant impact. The sector currently supports a total number of 5.2M jobs in the UK (BBSRC, 2018). Money spent by those employed by the bio-economy stimulates an additional £15.6 billion in gross value added to the economy. The bio-economy is also going to be critical in creating an economy that is environmentally sustainable and run on low carbon emissions.
Other encouraging signs are for bio-based companies, particularly SMEs, with £400m pledged to form a “Business Investment Bank” with the aim of assisting SMEs with scaling up. A recent example is BioVaLE, a not-for-profit company supported and steered by regional industry, research organisations, higher education and government. BioVaLE provides the support needed to build across Yorkshire and the Humber, the region’s capability and reputation as an innovation cluster for the bio-economy and ensure that it fully exploits new business opportunities in this sector. The interventions needed have been identified through extensive consultation with the region’s bio-economy stakeholders and they are keen to replicate the model across other areas of the UK. Nina Sweet (WRAP) also commented “there is a gap in the south of England to provide something like the ‘Biovale’ centre (See map of the BioPilotsUK). This offers an excellent opportunity for Cranfield using on previous experience through the BioThermal RED European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), de-risking and up-scaling. Further to this, while the sector starts understanding valorisation, there are still many industries that do not see the full potential values of waste streams as resources: ‘Trucks come in, products go out and the rest is discharged as trade waste...but the potential value of these discharges are significant..”’.
The Bioeconomy further provides a platform to the (bio)remediation sector to find sustainable solutions to environmental issues (i.e. biochar, phytoremediation, resource and energy recovery, fibre production), including the ever-growing lack of water resources which are under immense pressure due to land degradation, pollution, population expansion, urbanization, and global economic development. With respect to UK and Europe, the scale of the challenge posed by contaminated land is enormous; there are over 2.5 million contaminated sites reported across the EEA-39 that affect 231 million people and incur an annualised management cost of €4.8 billion (EEA, 2015). Despite the differences in local and urban scale needs in lower and middle (per capita) income countries (LMIC) and even in larger economies such as China and India, they face as in the UK an ongoing trend towards urbanization, re-densification and increasing stock of marginal land resulting from changes in urban land usage (i.e. post-industrialisation, or resulting from minerals extraction or waste disposal). Yet, key policy instruments and initiatives for sustainable development have not fully recognised how contaminated soils compromise addressing major challenges such as food and water security, biodiversity loss, climate change and energy sustainability. This situation is further exacerbated in DAC nations by rapid transitions in industrial, landfill and urban living space, industrial restructuring, and relatively uncontrolled exploitation of natural resources. This situation might appear bleak, but it does present us with an exciting opportunity for a combined resource-recovery and remediation strategy regarded as integral to bio-economy and sustainability goals.
Furthermore, a means to propel the sustainable, circular economy, the effective utilisation of agricultural, industrial and municipal wastes via biotechnology is increasingly attractive. For example, the developments in synthetic biology and microbial biotechnology are promising alternative green routes for the production of commercially important chemicals and overcoming the challenges posed by the non-sustainable petrochemical industry on resources. Moreover, the use of non-edible feedstocks offers a sustainable alternative to ensure the long term viability of biorefineries which can be expended later on as part the CIBS growth.
Colleagues in the School of Water, Energy and Environment are currently active and contributing to some of the technical and market developments in the bio-economy including:
- Biochemical building blocks and bio-based plastics (i.e. Wagland, Jiang, Encinas-Oropesa); the EU market could reach €5.2 billion in 2030.
- Novel foods with alternative protein (i.e. Villa, Medina Vaya); in Europe, protein was a €33.4 billion market in 2013.
- Bioremediation, marginal land, nature-based solutions, waste and resource recovery (i.e. Coulon, Jiang, Campo, Harris, Corstanje); Global remediation market set to rise to over $123 billion by 2022.
This momentum will help to secure new opportunities for the School, the UK export, industry scale-up, new skills, jobs, trade, and international investment.
By Frederic Coulon, Professor of Environmental Chemistry and Microbiology, Cranfield Water Science Institute