The Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission has just published a synthesis infographic entitled “The EU Bioeconomy: trends, biomass, and competitiveness“.
This document describes the current state of the EU bioeconomy based on data from the EU Bioeconomy Monitoring System. It highlights notable progress over the past decade — particularly in food security, energy efficiency, and reduced dependency on fossil resources — while pointing to persistent environmental challenges, such as the decline of the forest carbon sink and the deterioration of land-based habitats.
Despite clear ambitions, the gap between today’s reality and tomorrow’s targets is stark. Bio-based plastics account for just 1% of EU plastic production. Timber and hemp — which could cut embodied carbon in buildings by 40% — remain marginal in construction. Bio-based fibres maintain their 30-40% share of EU textile production. Bridging this gap calls for a decisive scale-up of integrated biorefineries, advanced fermentation, and biogenic carbon capture.
The report underlines a key strategic issue: biomass demand is growing faster than available supply, raising the question of a “biomass gap” by 2040 to meet the ambitions set out in the new EU Bioeconomy Strategy.
Directly connected to these challenges, PROMOFER project is working to address precisely this type of challenges, by developing high-value bioplastics. The products resulting from the project have concrete applications in the agricultural, fashion and packaging sectors, perfectly illustrating the biomass cascading and circular use logic advocated by the JRC.
