Client: Collaborative Innovate UK Grant with partners from the Bio-based and Biodegradable Industries Association (BBIA), The University of Sheffield, Higginson Strategy, and Resource Media.
Date: December 2024 to February 2026
Alder BioInsights Project Team:
Adrian Higson, Managing Director
Gail Shuttleworth, Senior Consultant
Polly-Ann Hanson, Consultant
Lola Higson, Intern
Background
BB-REG-NET is the UK’s first regulatory science network dedicated to bio-based and biodegradable materials. It is one of 11 networks supported by Innovate UK through a £4.7 million programme aimed at advancing regulatory science.
This is an important recognition that regulation is a key part of the innovation process, in providing confidence to innovators, certainty for investors and a reassurance to consumers. However, development of regulations can struggle to keep pace with technological advances leading to uncertainty across the spectrum of users, investors, and developers. The aim of the networks was to give policymakers access to the research and evidence support needed to underpin evidence-based policy making and create a more supportive regulatory environment for new products and services.
Objective
BB-REG-NET’s focusses on advancing regulation and creating business growth opportunities for biobased and biodegradable materials. Its core objectives are to bring together stakeholders from across the innovation spectrum (including industry, academia, and government colleagues) to assess and develop approaches to evaluate the environmental, economic and societal impact of bio-based and biodegradable materials. In so doing, it tackles the barriers that can slow innovation: inconsistent policy, standardisation challenges, consumer confusion, and the difficulty of proving benefit-risk in a transparent way.
The network’s key deliverables in the current project centred on building the evidence needed for confident decision-making. It was structured around specialist working groups, including circular bioeconomy (led by Alder BioInsights), environmental impact assessment (University of Sheffield), economic impact analysis (Perspective Economics), and market acceptance and consumer understanding (University of Sheffield), and policy and regulatory engagement (Higginson Strategy).
Our Approach
Alder BioInsights undertook extensive desk-based research, stakeholder interviews, and face to face workshops to formulate in-depth information responding to the perception that biodegradable plastics contribute to the microplastic burden in the open environment, understanding the generation, fate and ecotoxicology of microplastics, as well as formulating the basis of a biomass hierarchy. This contributed to the following reports:
- Addressing the UK’s polysemous bioeconomy – a call for policy cohesion
- Do biodegradable plastics encourage littering?
- Plastics definitions in UK regulations
- Navigating standards for bio-based and biodegradable materials
- Addressing persistent plastic pollution: the case for biodegradable solutions
- Persistent plastic pollution and ecotoxicology – the role of biodegradable plastics
- Making the most of biomass – guiding principles for biomass utilisation in policy development
All of these reports were consolidated with those led by other project parters to form the basis of the network’s White Paper ‘Growing the UK’s Modern Industrial Bioeconomy’, which was launched in the UK Parliament in December 2025.
Alder also led on 7 workshops aimed at developing understanding of the sector across key stakeholders – including government colleagues – and other interested parties. Three of these focussed on the development of biobased materials (including sessions on understanding key terms and concepts, biorefineries and producers as well as sessions run by University of Sheffield partners on LCA).
All of the reports and recordings of the webinars are held on the BB-REG-NET website (About Us – BB-REG-NET).
Outcomes and Benefits
In total, BB-REG-NET generated 16 reports and one substantive white paper over the funded period of one year. The network is well positioned for future funded opportunities and engagement across the UK and EU.
Alder BioInsights’ work builds on our significant experience to frame discussions around a key and often misunderstood issue: whether biodegradable materials are part of the solution to microplastics, and under what conditions they deliver genuine environmental benefit. This is the kind of rigorous, independent analysis the regulatory system needs to support it to adopt defensible, science-led decisions.