Redesigning the Primary Sector for Maximizing Bioeconomy Development

The EU has a significant amount of waste biomass available, more than 900 million tons per year, and 98% of this material ends up in landfill, incinerators, or rotting in open dumps. According to the 2023 Circularity Gap Report, the global economy is now only 7.2% circular. The EU has great potential to convert bio-waste into bio-based products that can be used in multiple bio-applications.

This revalorisation can directly support 5-10 times more employment and generate 4-9 times more added value than energy use.Circular Business Models in Bioeconomy (CBMB) face many challenges to become sustainable and profitable.

Firstly, primary producers, the owners of the valuable feedstock, are often not integrated into the bioeconomy value chains, and they are often small scale and are fragmented, reducing their ability to negotiate with those higher up the value chain. The result is a suboptimal distribution of benefits and incentives.

The main challenges in designing CBMB consist of: -lack of knowledge sharing and collaboration between stakeholders-need for new supply chains and logistical networks-difficult scale up of innovative technologies-understanding of the potential synergies and symbiotic relationships between sectors-overcoming poor public acceptance -complex and fragmented policy schemes, As a result of this, there is a lack of demonstrated and replicable systemic bio-solutions for the territorial deployment of the circular bioeconomy.The PRIMED ProjectPRIMED will co-create innovative forms of cooperation to integrate primary producers in novel bioeconomy value chains with a multi-actor approach.

To do so, PRIMED will develop novel CBMB to produce high-value bio-based products through advanced biorefineries, and will demonstrate them in five Living Labs (LLab):PRIMED will also empower multi-actors to co-design a collaborative ecosystem to accelerate the bioeconomy, with an Open Access knowledge hub and toolkit (PRIMED digital toolbox).