World-leading sustainable bio-based chemicals and materials (BB-Materials) developed, designed and manufactured in the UK, offer a once-in-a-generation opportunity to transition away from oil-and-gas, creating a resilient-engine for net-zero, and securing and growing hundreds-of-thousands of highly-skilled and productive jobs. Chemicals are in everything we use in our daily lives - food, textiles, energy, batteries, defence products, mobile phones and medicines - ensuring our food security, clothes we wear, heating our homes, affording national security, enabling communications and delivering treatments for diseases. Today, almost all chemicals are made from fossil oil-and-gas, being responsible for ~10% of Global-Greenhouse-Gas-Emissions. The UK chemicals industry has an ambition. By 2050, it will have doubled in size, sourcing 30% of its carbon feedstock from biomass (Innovate UK, 2024, unpublished), with manufacturing of just 15 biochemicals having potential to contribute 5.2 million-tonnes CO2eq GHG-savings and £1.6 billion annually to the UK economy (DESNZ, 2024, unpublished). Through accelerating the commercialisation of BB-Materials, if 30% of chemicals could be bio-based by 2050, this has potential for £26.25 billion annual income. The UK is the home of BB-Materials academic excellence, but other areas of the world are already implementing policies/regulations to drive this sector forwards and the UK is rapidly losing this competitive advantage. Our engagement with 186 individuals and 102 organisations during the Discovery phase concluded that a lack of overarching strategy has led to disconnected departmental policies that hinder BB-Materials commercialisation, and regulations that are better suited to fossil-based incumbents. Due to the nascent nature of the sector, there is limited scientific data and evidence for robust development of regulations, detrimentally impacting the growth trajectory of BB-Materials. Standardised terminology and adequate language for communication is missing, leading to consumer confusion and green-washing. _BB-REG-NET Implementation will establish a network of BB-Material stakeholders, with the aim of developing new tools, standards and approaches to evaluate the quality, performance and environmental and economic impact of BB-Materials, to assess benefit-risk and facilitate sound and transparent regulatory decision-making._ BB-REG-NET will: * Generate evidence using regulatory science tools, such as standards, metrics, peer-reviewed research, to inform policy and assist regulators with complex decisions. * Develop stronger partnerships across the regulatory innovation ecosystem, bringing together different disciplines. * Share knowledge to inform evidence-based policymaking, allowing the sound assessment of risks and benefits of BB-materials. * Provide business-growth opportunities by removing barriers to the commercialisation of BB-materials, which are essential to a UK circular bioeconomy and sustainable economic growth.

As the global population continues to grow apace (by a further 25% to 2050), the demand for food will increase. Traditional, agriculture will struggle to fulfil the demands made upon it. Pressure will come not only from the number of people needing to be fed but from other related issues, such as land use change to accommodate more agriculture, increased water use, chemical use, increased eutrophication of water courses, loss of biodiversity and damage to precious topsoils. To address this, several approaches which look to change the course of both food (and feed) production and consumer purchasing habits are being explored. One such approach is to use microbial cell factories to produce nutrient-dense, high quality food/feed ingredients. Microbial food products have the potential to help transform the global food industry away from resource inefficient production, which pollutes and denudes the environment, towards production of highly nutritious food in scalable, fully controlled, contained and monitored, fermentation processes. This project will seek to both improve the process efficiency and sustainability of microbial food production and expand the market opportunity by developing new product streams. The project will develop novel processes for the production of microbial biomass from sustainable feedstocks. Microbial SCP is naturally high in protein and to increase its value as a food ingredient, processes will be developed to generate a soluble protein isolate fraction for use as a food ingredient, with the insoluble fraction for use as an animal feed ingredient. The soluble protein fraction will be assessed for valuable properties such as gelling, foaming and binding, for replacement of animal-derived proteins in meat-free products. The insoluble fraction will be assessed as an animal feed ingredient for farmed fish and piglets. The outcomes of this project will be the development of new processes and technologies to produce novel, nutrient rich, microbially-derived food and animal feed products. The processes developed will be resource efficient, reducing CO2 emissions, with low water and land usage requirements compared to traditional agriculture. The processes will be highly scalable and non-seasonal, using technology that can be deployed anywhere.

Surfactants are chemicals with both hydrophilic (water loving) and hydrophobic (water hating) regions, which makes them extremely useful for mixing oils and water, stabilising foams and removing dirt from surfaces and laundry. As a result, surfactants are used across a broad array of industrial sectors and products, including laundry detergents and cleaning, personal care (shampoos, hand and body wash liquids), plant protection as wetting agents, in paints and coatings and as emulsifiers in pharmaceuticals. Most of the surfactants available today are substantially derived from fossil fuels. Biobased surfactants could be an alternative but those that are currently available have limited functionality and are typically 3 to 5 times more expensive that fossil-based surfactants. However, customers and consumers are demanding sustainable biobased ingredients and there is a real need now for highly functional, biobased surfactants for an array of applications. This project will demonstrate the potential for a novel family of biobased surfactants, based on the furan headgroup derived from sugars from waste agricultural residues, to replace fossil-derived surfactants. Led by _in silico_ data modelling, a number of furan surfactant variants will be selected for synthesis and testing. A commercially relevant process for manufacturing the lead furan surfactants will be demonstrated at lab scale. Availability of suitable feedstocks and building blocks to manufacture the furan surfactants in the UK will be mapped. Potential furan building block producers, feedstock converters and customers will be invited to engage with the project via a stakeholder board to align Furafact both with the UK chemicals manufacturing industry and customer demands.