EU Bioeconomy 2013 Turnover Report

Here is an interesting recent report published by Nova Institute on behalf of the Bio-based Industries Consortium (BIC). According to the report below, 2013 sales from the European Bioeconomy (meaning parts of the economy that use renewable biological resources from land and sea to produce food, materials and energy) had a total of EUR 2.1 trillion.

However, this includes food and beverages (50%), agriculture and forestry sectors (21%), and the rest are from the so-called bio-based industries (chemicals and plastics, pharmaceuticals, paper and paper products, forest-based industries, textile sector, biofuels and bioenergy).

If focusing only on this bio-based industries, the total turnover in the EU-28 bio-based economy will be at EUR600 billion.  

EuroStat was used as the main source of data for all sectors of the bioeconomy in this report. The data on this report also showed increase of bio-based share of the chemical industry from 5% in 2008 to 6% in 2013 (which is pretty slow in my personal opinion). The raw materials used by the chemical industry are about 50% organic (fossil and bio-based) and about 50% inorganic (minerals, metals, etc). If only taking the organic part, the overall bio-based share increased from 10% in 2008 to 12% in 2013.

Denmark is said to be the one Member State with the highest bio-based share in the chemical industry in 2013 mainly due to the high production of enzymes (think Novozymes…).

By the end of 2014, BIC members reportedly intended to invest EUR1.1 billion during 2014 to 2015 in bio-based industries – mainly on demo and flagship projects, of which more than EUR820 million were pure private investments. Pipeline projects from those same BIC members is expected to amount to more than EUR2.1 billion between 2014 and 2020 focusing mostly on lignocellulosic and forestry-based value chains.

By the way, I will be presenting and attending Nova Institute’s Bio-based Materials conference next month so I will probably get more information about this report. Follow my tweets from there via @Dgreenblogger #NovaBio16.