Poland is among the fastest growing EU economies today, recording the region’s largest annual and quarterly GDP jump in the second quarter of this year.
Infrastructure investments, high-quality educational institutions, and EU membership have all contributed – the same attributes now fuelling expansion in Poland’s biobased industries.
We look at how Poland’s domestic biobased sectors are shaping up as the wider economy grows, ranging from more traditional areas like biogas to biomaterial startups.
The emerging higher-value bioeconomy
The Polish bioeconomy is dominated by traditional sectors of the bioeconomy such as food and agriculture. These bring in revenue than higher-value activities that process biological raw materials into industrial materials and chemicals.
As a result, Poland has long been top of the EU rankings for bioeconomy employment but in terms of value-added and turnover from the bioeconomy, the country comes just fifth.
Biobased processing and biotech may be emerging sectors but are among the fastest growing. The country’s capabilities extend across biopharmaceuticals but also industrial biotech, which manufactures chemical ingredients from renewable sources.
One of the reasons for this is a highly educated workforce coupled with low labour costs compared to elsewhere in Europe. Polish academics and industrial partners have contributed to research and development projects on the BBI JU, CBE JU, and other European programmes.
Academia-business interlinkages are being forged in technology parks across the country focused on the bioeconomy: Kutno Agro-industrial Park, in the Lodzkie region, Wrocław Technology Park (coordinator of cluster Nutribiomed) in the Dolnoslaskie region, and the Łódzki Regionalny Park Naukowo-Technologiczny (coordinator of BioNanoPark) in the Lodzkie region.
Biobased companies in Poland
Poland has nurtured a dynamic group of young companies in industrial biotech. Biotechnika is an engineering and design company active in the space, focusing on biorefining primary and waste streams, the production of biofuels and bioenergy, and on biological waste and sewage management.
MakeGrowLab is a Polish startup developing replacements for plastic and other unsustainable materials in industrial ingredients, targeting a wide spectrum of customers in industry looking to source more sustainable materials.
Since its founding in 2016 and initially developing a home compostable plastic-free packaging material, the startup has branched out into more advanced materials design. Now, MakeGrowLab itself is a microbial manufacturing startup with a patented method to grow nanofibres in the cells of microorganisms.
MakeGrowLab’s main product is SPM, a version of nanocellulose that is meant to cut back on the environmental impact of the conventional nanocellulose methods, which involves felling trees and treating wood with toxic chemicals. Turning away from conventional processes the startup harnesses microorganisms fed on biowaste to create its product. Nanocellulose is used as a reinforcing agent in composite materials, paper, polymers, adhesives, cosmetics, paints, even in food additives.
Making a functional substitutes with a lighter environmental footprint is one thing but MakeGrowLab also claims to have achieved a biomaterial that exceeds the performance of the original: a higher surface area-to-volume ratio, higher tensile strength and more.
Warsaw-based startup Ecobean exemplifies the country’s strength in science and technology R&D, having emerged from the Warsaw University of Technology. The company has developed a technology for processing coffee waste into sustainable materials – coffee oil, antioxidants, lactic acid, protein additives, and coffee lignin, creating a circular loop for one of the most carbon-intensive and thirsty food crops in the world.
Legacy industries experiment with biobased products
Poland’s large and growing legacy industries of rubber, plastics, and pharmaceutical production – still heavily reliant on petrochemicals – are also driving investments into biobased pilot projects.
One indicative producer is Grupa Azoty, which deals in chemicals and fertilisers with 8 production plants in the country. It recently launched a pilot line to produce biodegradable thermoplastic starch. The line has a 300 tonne per annum capacity. Synthos is another petrochemical player experimenting with biomaterials, focused on obtaining synthetic rubber from renewable raw materials.
The largest petrochemical companies in Poland PKN Orien and Lotso too are breaking into renewables production, setting up Europe’s largest green propylene glycol production unit at its biorefinery in Trzebinia. The company is also testing the waters within microbial biomanufacturing, launching the first pilot in Poland for producing lactic acid using microorganisms.
Biogas potential
Biochemicals, bio-textiles, and biofuels are areas still in need of more policy support and investments in Poland. However, one bioeconomy sector with more immediate scaling potential is biogas.
Produced from biodegradable waste, biogas counts as a renewable energy source for both heat and electricity. On the value chain, biogas production sits between agriculture and the more advanced biobased processing, making it an ideal way for a large food producer such as Poland to bring down emissions while developing its circular bioeconomy.
Poland’s large agricultural sector gives a huge avenue into strengthening this source of renewable energy, providing a mass of feedstock. Yet at the end of 2023, there were 218 agricultural biogas plants and only 148 municipal biogas plants in Poland. Small plants with a capacity of up to 1 MW predominating. This is compared to around 9000 biogas plants in Germany. Moreover, there were no single commercial biomethane plants in Poland.
Estimates say the country could comfortably accommodate several thousand biogas and biomethane plants, more than 10 times the current capacity. One study showed that Poland could increase its electricity production by 29% and its heat production 28% by drawing on the resource.
Policy shifts indicate that the biogas industry will get more priority from the government from now. The previous Polish government was keen to scale the industry, adopting a bill in early 2023 amending the country’s Renewable Energy Sources Act with the aim of boosting renewable gas development.
The law raises the current limit of permissible installed capacity for biogas from 500 kW to 3.5 MW and simplifies the process for obtaining building rights and grid connection. One of the drivers of the law was the aim of supporting smaller towns to accelerate their energy transition away from coal, which remains a major energy source and industry in the country.
Apart from a source of renewable energy, biogas plants can support a wider circular and sustainable shift. It cleans up farm byproducts, reducing emissions and effluents from untreated animal waste. The process of generating biogas can also yield biobased fertiliser in the form of digestate, which can replace more potent synthetic inputs in arable farming that can cause severe water pollution.
What regulations are supporting the Polish biobased sector?
As a member of the EU, the country is subject to increasing sustainable consumption laws including for single use plastic reduction. Poland completed the legislative process for implementing the single use plastics directive in 2023.
Then there is the EU-wide 2030 target for renewable energy. Poland aims to contribute by hitting 21-23% of renewable energy sources share in gross final energy consumption by 2030, a goal that will likely spur more biogas and biomethane capacity rollout.
There is no Polish national strategy in place yet targeted at growing the biobased sector. There is however the Polish Circular Economy Roadmap adopted in 2019, which contains a focus on developing the Polish bioeconomy, particularly in the power industry.
The 2030 National Waste Management Plan is another government blueprint that could benefit certain parts of the biomaterials and biochemicals sector. It aims to develop infrastructure for both aerobic and anaerobic organic recycling that is capable of processing biodegradable packaging waste.
What is holding it back?
Poland faces many of the same barriers to growing its biobased and circular industries as other economies.
A big barrier in preventing bioplastics from becoming an environmental hazard are the holes in infrastructure around bioplastics processing and recycling.
This is a huge barrier to growth in biobased packaging and materials since many bioplastics are technically biodegradable but only under correct industrial conditions. ‘Biodegradability’ and ‘compostability’ are also very broad categories encompassing a hue diversity of materials that require distinctive processing treatments. With waste management infrastructure still dominated by landfilling, there is little capacity for valorising biobased goods at the end of their lives.
Laws around how producers must communicate a biomaterials’ end-of-life needs to consumers is also a work in progress. There is no formal code for classifying bio-based plastic packaging waste in a way that is clear for both producers and consumers.
While Poland lags on bioplastics end-of-life processing, it does have an increasing amount of processing capacity for organic waste such as garden and food waste. Composting has been developing more rapidly in recent years – so much in fact that the country will need 11 to 17 more composting facilities by 2034 to meet increased demand. Still, some stakeholders say lack of investment into composting infrastructure, including local collection services, is harming the development of a compostable packaging industry in the country.
These problems in developing the biobased sectors are not exclusive to Poland and are prevalent across the EU economies. In a sector that demands more risk and capital than most others, further growth in the more advanced sectors of the bioeconomy will depend on more supportive policies, including taxonomies for biobased products and infrastructure such as demo and pilot plants.