Op-ed by Jen Vanderhoven, CEO of the BBIA and the BioRevolution Coalition.
Look around your bathroom, your kitchen or your car, and you will find a quiet dependency. The shampoo on the shelf, the packaging around your lunch, the trim on your dashboard, even your chewing gum: most of it began life as imported oil and gas. Not because it has to, but because that is how the system was built.
There is another way to make these everyday things, and the UK is exceptionally good at it. Yet right now, we risk handing that advantage to our competitors.
The UK bioeconomy uses biological resources, such as plants, algae, microorganisms and agricultural or food waste, to make the ingredients and materials we already know and use. It’s already happening in UK factories and labs, turning out commercial products rather than science projects.
Two companies showing what’s possible
In the North West, Holiferm is rethinking one of the most common ingredients in the home. The foaming agents in soap and household cleaners are usually made from petrochemicals or palm oil. Holiferm ferments sugar, using microbes, to produce biosurfactants that do the same job, without oil wells or palm plantations.
Shellworks is tackling the product packaging problem. It ferments waste biomass into packaging that can be composted at home and is free from BPA, PFAS and phthalates. Crucially, it runs on existing plastic manufacturing lines, so brands don’t need new factories to switch, and it is already on supermarket shelves.
The size of the prize
Globally, the bioeconomy is forecast to be worth over £30 trillion by 2050. With the right policy support, bio-based chemicals and materials alone could generate upwards of £200 billion in annual revenue for UK plc by the same date, create 4,500 new skilled jobs each year, and save over five million tonnes of CO2 annually.
There’s a security case too. In fact, the energy price shock triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine cost the UK £183 billion over four years. The chemicals and materials supply chain carries the same exposure; a domestic bioeconomy built on UK-grown crops, algae and industrial waste cannot be disrupted by a war or an oil decision made on the other side of the world.
And unlike AI, where the UK is trying to chase the US and China, this is a market we already lead but are being severely held back.
The problem is not our science; it is our policy
The Government has committed £2 billion over the next decade to bio-based innovation, yet fewer than one in ten of the innovations it funds ever make it out of the lab. Bio-based products take up to 45% longer to reach market, and cost more than double to approve, compared with their fossil equivalents. Part of the reason is that nobody owns the brief. Responsibility is split across several departments, making the UK the only G7 country without a bioeconomy strategy.
Meanwhile, one arm of government funds innovation while another taxes it out of the market. The Plastic Packaging Tax gives credit for recycled fossil content but none for renewable carbon (biomass) content. And many carbon accounting standards were built with fossil products as the default, meaning a genuinely sustainable bio-based product can score as up to 103% more damaging than it really is.
The consequences are already visible. Of 45 bio-based companies we surveyed, more than half were considering moving production to the EU or North America. Not because the science is better there, but because the finance and infrastructure are. If we don’t act, the jobs, investment and intellectual property we have paid to create will leave with them.
Five changes that would make the difference
That is why the BioRevolution Coalition, backed by more than 60 organisations spanning industry, start-ups, researchers and academics, has launched a petition calling for five specific reforms.
First, put one minister in charge of the bioeconomy, so companies have a single point of contact instead of being passed between four government departments. Second, fix the tax and policy mismatches that penalise bio-based products. Third, align carbon accounting by mandating the new BS EN 18027:2025 standard whenever bio-based and fossil-based materials are compared. Fourth, use public procurement to create demand, starting with an NHS pilot; around £5.5 billion of the health service’s single-use plastic contracts could technically be switched to bio-based alternatives today. Fifth, back first-of-a-kind commercial biorefineries, matching the £184 million already committed to scale-up infrastructure with co-funding, just as the National Wealth Fund model helped offshore wind.
None of this means weakening safety standards. In fact, much of it is not new spending at all, but removing penalties that should have never existed.
A choice for the Budget
With the UK’s Autumn Budget approaching, the Government is searching for growth. It does not need to look far. The bioeconomy offers high-value jobs in the regions, from Scotland’s biorefining corridor to Yorkshire’s chemicals belt and the North West’s fermentation base, alongside a more resilient supply chain and progress on net zero.
The UK has already done the hard part: the science. What it lacks is a plan to turn that science into an industry at home. Get these five changes right, and Britain can lead one of the defining markets of this century. Get them wrong, and we will keep funding inventions we don’t get to keep. If you agree, add your name to the petition!
Jen Vanderhoven is CEO of BBIA & BioRevolution Coalition – for more information, click here and here.
