The agroforest sector plays a leading role as a biomass supplier to obtain bio-based products that allowed an acceleration in the circular bioeconomy transition. This chapter applied a mixed-methods review to identify new attractive bio-based products and to evaluate its market potential in Portugal. Forest biomass was identified as an excellent raw material for (1) low-carbon building materials, (2) biotextiles, and (3) bioplastics. The potential of agro-food waste to obtain new bio-based materials was also emphasised. The new bioproducts identified have high potential and attractive markets. It was estimated that a 5% market share of these bioproducts in the global construction, textiles, and plastics markets in 2030 corresponds to an aggregate increase in revenues of 260-579 million € per year in Portugal. The environmental sustainability implications arising from the diffusion of these new biomaterials are also highlighted, focusing on the decarbonisation of the economy.
TopIntroduction
Developing the bioeconomy is relevant on the political agenda of the European Community as a collective whole (European Commission, 2018) and several of its states, including Portugal. Portugal published its Smart Specialization Strategy in 2015. Bioeconomy is not treated as a single topic but is rather scattered across different themes (Bio-based Industries Consortium (BIC), 2018). The circular economy is also considered as a promising approach to help reduce global sustainability pressure (Temmes & Peck, 2020). In Portugal, the circular economy concept is mostly applied in the area of waste management. There is a lack of circular economy awareness among Portuguese companies and high dependence on imported raw materials for production (Škrinjarí, 2020). In recent years, the bioeconomy and circular economy have been increasingly combined into a concept of circular bioeconomy (Hetemäki et al., 2017) with the intuit of mitigating some sustainability-related issues of the bioeconomy, particularly the inefficient use of natural resources (Temmes & Peck, 2020).
Portugal and Europe are currently experiencing a major development – the creation of a circular bioeconomy – with the capacity to transform the economy and society. This study analyzes the circular bioeconomy as a new economic paradigm with the potential of replacing materials and products based on fossil fuels by renewable materials in closed-loop cycles (Hetemäki et al., 2017).
Based on the principles of circular bioeconomy, the new bio-based products need to have high economic value-added, for as long as possible. For that, the reusability and recycling needs were taken into account in the design stage. The non-competition with food cultivation and avoid negative impacts on other ecosystem services should be privileged during bio-based products development (Hetemäki et al., 2017). In this scenario, the production of bio-based materials focused on the non-food use of bioresources as the forest biomass (Hurmekoski et al., 2018) and agro-food waste (Morone & Imbert, 2020) have been emerging.
Regarding new biomaterials and bioproducts, the potential of forest biomass for the implementation of circular bioeconomy and competitiveness in key sectors such as construction, textile and plastics have been emerging as the most promising bio-based markets (Hurmekoski et al., 2018).
Several studies have been developed to survey the opportunities and challenges of the European agroforest-based circular bioeconomy (Antikainen et al., 2017). However, few have identified the key growth markets and new products for bio-based industries in Europe (Hurmekoski et al., 2018), and especially in Portugal. According to the report of the Bio-based Industries Consortium (BIC) about the potential of Portugal for the bio-based industry (Bio-based Industries Consortium (BIC), 2018), Portugal has a significant potential for the implementation of circular bioeconomy. Agro-food and forest have been crucial sectors of the national economy. The substantial amount of by-products and waste from these sectors and the related processing industries are potential suppliers of biomass for the development of new bio-based products. Among these sectors, wood-based industries (sawn, pulp and paper), besides having great importance for Portuguese economy and employment, they use essentially raw material produced in the country. This is an advantage of the forest sector compared to other important economic activities that are based on imported raw materials (Rego et al., 2013). The establishment of the more promising bio-based products from forest biomass in Portuguese market could be an opportunity to accelerate the deployment of sustainable and circular bio-based solutions in Portugal.