Biomonitor – Monitoring the Bioeconomy

19 June 2018

Delft, 19 June 2018

On June 7 to 8 the kick-off meeting of the BioMonitor project took place in Brussels. Eighteen European partners coming from public and private research institutions will work together with NEN to establish a sustainable data and modelling framework for the bioeconomy that is effective and robust for stakeholders to use in order to come up with up-to-date and relevant policies on emerging bio-based products.

BioMonitor is a project funded under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Biotech programme. It provides an opportunity for all 18 partners from 10 countries to offer an effective and robust methodology catered to the people working in statistical and custom offices, laboratories, policy makers and industries all over the world. The project will run for four years and will be led by Wageningen University.

The BioMonitor project wants to address the information gap and mismatch of emerging innovative industries coming from the chemical and materials sectors that deal with the production of bio-based intermediate and end-products. It also wants to resolve the lack of indicators needed to quantify the bioeconomy’s economic, environmental and social impacts in the EU and its Member States.

“We urgently need a set of reliable tools to measure the size and developments of the EU bioeconomy,” as pointed out by Justus Wesseler of the Wageningen University, who is the coordinator of the BioMonitor project. “The BioMonitor project will assist the EU leaders in assessing to what extent the UN sustainable development goals are met, and what measures could help the rural development in the EU.”

Indeed, these will be achieved by developing an integrated quantitative kit composed of a comprehensive bioeconomy database, an all-around data analysis and modelling toolbox, and a platform tailored according to professional stakeholders’ needs. It is the role of NEN to provide various training methods, standardization sheets, standards revision proposals and communication tools in order to guide the industry providing and the policy offers using statistical data. This to guarantee the uptake of these new set of bioeconomy standards over a longer period of time.

__________________________________________________________________________________

Notes for Editors

BioMonitor (Monitoring the Bioeconomy) has received funding from the European Union Horizon 2020 Biotech Programme under grant agreement n° 773297. The project starts in June 2018 and is set to run for four years.

Other articles

Major hurdles leading to a lack of level playing field for bio-based industry
24 April 2019

The bio-based industry faces a number of regulatory and standardisation hurdles for market entry. Based on these barriers, a missing level playing field for bio-based products hampers investments in this industry, which limits the chance of future technological developments and innovations to mature and enter the market at commercial scales. Five main themes have been … Continued

Developing standards for bio-based industries
26 March 2019

Standards play a crucial role in supporting the growth of the bio-based products market. They can help to increase market transparency by providing common reference methods and requirements that enable the verification of claims and certification regarding the bio-based content, biodegradability or environmental sustainability of different products. However, inadequate standards can also act as barriers … Continued

Common language across the value chains of bio-based products – where are the real challenges?
10 December 2018

Terminology and common language used across the whole value chains from farmer to consumer is of major importance to facilitate the market uptake of bio-based products. The study carried out within the EU funded project STAR4BBI concludes that challenges are related to misuses of terms and to the lack of knowledge of characteristics of bio-based … Continued