Helping businesses in the bioeconomy become more circular
Author
With years of experience supporting the bioeconomy, Amanda Ingram shares practical insights on how your business can start embracing circular practices and unlock new value.
For bio-based businesses, embracing circular practices can deliver benefits much wider than sustainability - it can lower costs, create new economic opportunities, and strengthen resource resilience.
Approaching circularity
One of the most effective ways to achieve more circular processes is to examine the whole process flow of your business from beginning to end. What are you buying, what are you using, what are you producing, what arises as a by-product or waste, and what could you do differently to design in efficiency and design out waste?
For instance, when procuring goods and services, being overly specific about your requirements can limit opportunities to find more efficient options or innovative solutions that may deliver greater value.
What does this look like?
An example of this would be the procurement of 'specific pesticide and fungicide chemicals' as a product to reduce crop loss from pest and disease. Instead, by procuring 'solutions for reducing crop loss', you may identify alternative opportunities such as the procurement of a service model that provides data-driven modelling to select disease and pest resistant crop varieties. Thereby designing out pest and disease-related waste, increasing yield and improving efficiency.
Organisations such as the James Hutton Institute are developing high-yielding, resilient crop varieties to improve quality, disease resistance, and climate adaptation and support food security.
A circular bioeconomy
The bioeconomy includes the parts of the economy that use renewable biological resources from land, water, and air such as crops, forests, fish, animals, and micro-organisms and the conversion of these resources into products such as food, feed, materials, and energy for economic purposes.
Circularity in the bioeconomy is an integrated approach that applies circular economy principles to biological resources, focusing on designing out waste and inefficiencies, keeping materials in use, and regenerating natural systems across the entire value chain. The goal is to maximise resource efficiency and recover nutrients, thereby displacing the need for fossil-based inputs and minimising environmental impacts.
Small scale, big impact
For smaller businesses, collaboration can be a powerful way to overcome financial constraints. Partnering with larger companies or academic institutions often sparks ventures that begin modestly and grow over time. Localised approaches also play a vital role, as smaller regional markets are typically easier to access than large international ones.
Securing funding is often one of the greatest challenges for businesses adopting new models. Building confidence is crucial and that begins with proving that alternative materials and services can meet or exceed the quality of those they are designed to replace and creating market demand.
Clear evidence of performance not only builds trust but also unlocks new market opportunities. Additionally, there is scope to consider the adoption of new business models in Scotland that have already been proven elsewhere. For instance, demonstrating that fish skins function as superior biological dressings for burns compared to traditional solutions has enabled Kerecis to establish high-value global markets. The Scottish Ocean Cluster is exploring the potential to adopt similar opportunities for fish waste and by-products in Scotland.
Support from Zero Waste Scotland
Zero Waste Scotland can assist you on your journey. We act as a facilitator, connecting businesses with support and advice bodies and promoting models that can be replicated. Through case studies and practical examples, we share knowledge and information to demonstrate some of the successful journeys already taken by businesses and their learnings along the way. This is why we have launched the Business and Enterprise Hub to make circularity easier to understand and implement.
Ready to take the next step? Explore our Business Information Hub for practical tools, case studies, and support. See how others have turned challenges into opportunities—and start your own success story today.