EUROPE ON THE FOREFRONT: SAFE AND BIO-BASED COATINGS FOR A NEW ECONOMY
Interview to Cyrille Durand, Temas Solutions and BIORING partner
(Interview made on 24th July 2025)
How to manage anticipatory sustainability and safety assessment of innovative products or processes?
First, it is very important to understand and map the life cycle of the developed materials or products: both understanding the stages a product goes through from its initial concept to its End of Life, whether it will be disposed, reused, or recycled, and understand who the stakeholders are in each of the stages.
Second, you need to identify the impacts along the life cycle in terms of safety (exposure and hazard), sustainability and recyclability parameters. Understanding what the hotspots are allows to set priority levels on the data needed for the assessment. For example, through the life cycle mapping you might notice that manufacturing a product will likely use a large amount of energy, thus you will need to give a particular focus on CO2 emission.
Engaging since the early stages with stakeholders (mainly project partners) is essential, as they are the ones providing the data. They need to understand the importance of the assessment, as well as the purpose and type of information they will need to provide. Data gathering can be facilitated, as we do, through well-established questionnaire: for example, in BIORING we asked partners developing the building blocks and the coating formulation and end-users partners to compile it.
Stakeholders’ data are instrumental also to compare the assessment results with benchmarks or standards counterparts of the developed materials. This is how you verify if your product is safer and more sustainable.
Once you know well the life cycle and have identified the hotspots and the related data needed, it is very likely to face the challenge of missing data, especially at the beginning of the innovation process, where the information is scarce. Adopting an iterative assessment, closely working with all stakeholders, especially the developers in the lab, is crucial: as a project progresses, it develops more data (both quantitative and qualitative) and allows the assessment completion and reiteration, until you reach the most accurate and reliable version possible. This is what we did in BIORING, where there was a severe lack of data due to the novelty of the project.
Is there another layer of complexity when dealing with bio-products?
Assessing biomass transformation is more complex due to new chemicals and chemical processes that lacks raw data. For example, in BIORING we explored a novel area of research, with very limited data related to the transformation of lignin in new bio-based molecules or monomers.
Based on the BIORING experience, we proposed some learnings and recommendations for both safety & sustainability assessors and policy maker. These include encouraging the creation of a European database on biomass transformation, filled with inputs from all EU projects working in this field, a better application of the SSbD framework, and the extension of EU Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) method – a set of category rules guiding Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) – to bioplastics.
A key aspect is to identify a clear definition of bio-based plastics, as a comparative base. Looking at commercially available “bio-based” coatings benchmarks, we found out that many claimed “bio-coatings” were lacking a clear definition of what was the “bio” content or if a “sustainable” methodology was applied in their development. This created quite a confusion, especially when comparing different products from different companies.
(Recommendations are reported in the BIORING Deliverable 6.1, soon available)
How a definition for bio-based plastic should be set?
We think we should have a legally binding instrument to calculate the percentage of bio-content based on a common protocol, or at least indicate how the calculation was made. In addition, we should set a minimum threshold of bio-content (e.g. 50%) to call a product “bio-based”, and then possibly add an eco-label to indicate how the product performs compared to the threshold (e.g. with a rating scale, like some of the existing EU eco-labels do). This could be another incentive for industries to invest more in bio-based products.
What is your vision about the development and relevance of the bio-sector in Europe?
It’s an extremely important sector for granting independence of European players in the global scenario. It is largely acknowledged that biomass resources have the potential to progressively replace fossil fuels. We need to invest in science and technology to transform this biomass into real product, cost- and performance- competitive with fossil-based one.
And if we want to have truly sustainable products, we need to go beyond the reduction of impact on climate change: the sustainability assessment should carefully look also the impact on land use and water consumption, as well as on human and the environment, and integrate results with performance and economic aspects.
I have a very positive vision of the use of biomass to replace the fossil-based product, but at the same time we really need to look at sustainability with a holistic approach.
Shifting towards biomass means also creating a new economy, the bioeconomy. It will create new jobs for biomass cultivation, that need to be as much as possible local to limit transport, as well for biomass transformation, with new chemists to develop bio-based molecules. Bioeconomy is a pillar of circular economy, on both sides of the loop: an inflow of recycled, reusable or renewable – coming from bioeconomy – and recyclable, reusable or biodegradable materials coming back to bioeconomy at the end of their life.
Eventually, avoiding further soil exploitation and biodiversity reduction, e.g. using by-products of already existing biomass value chains, and promote new economy and business models are also key aspects, clearly acknowledged by the European Bioeconomy strategy.
How many years and resources the shift to an almost complete bioeconomy will take?
To drastically increase the bio-products market share – today only 5% or less – we must invest into two aspects. Firstly, Research and Development, to develop products that are competitive in terms of daily basis performance (not necessarily top performing). But R&D takes time or need a lot of investment. I think we could think about five to fifteen years from now, to fully develop these new chemical processes. The other aspect is scaling-up R&D to a production level. The BIORING economical assessment shows that large investments are needed to scale-up our production. Industries will make it, but they will take time to have assurance that these products could be competitive, and to have the appropriate time for scale-up.
Moreover, the chemical industry keeps investing in fossil-based products, and all their equipment should last 10 to 20 years more to be profitable. What do we do with this existing equipment? Who will repay them if the industry needs to throw them away in favour of the bioeconomy? So, in the end, I think a full shift to bioeconomy would take 20 to 30 years. Can we envisage to have 25%-30% of biobased products on the market by 2035? It’s hard to say, but would be the minimum goal we should set.
Will Europe be competitive and on the forefront of this innovation?
We understood earlier than other Countries that bioeconomy will be a key for the future of Europe, to ensure independence from fossil fuels. This is not enough to become leaders, but at least we started first and seems to be the most focused ones on this. Other players, such as China, are investing a lot and have large R&D capability. Our advantage, however, is that we don’t have many minerals or fossil fuels: we have biomass. Believing in our resources and deciding to make the best use of them, is a strong motivation to remain at the forefront of the bioeconomy.
Which are the most relevant barriers for bio-based solutions?
As I mentioned, the biggest barrier is investment. Increasing R&D and scale-up of new bio-based technologies will make biobased product cost-effective in comparison with fossil-based benchmarks. However, since fossil-based products benefit of decades of research and a still cheap and abundant raw material, there’s a long way to go to increase bioeconomy.
Another barrier already mentioned is the data gap, and how to share information that often are confidential. Most data will likely come from industry, rather than public-funded projects, and with some time delay due to patents. A solution could be pay-to-access databases like Ecoinvent, used by all LCA practitioners, and if still there are no data, like for some substances in BIORING, use AI modelling and proxies from publicly available primary or secondary – so less confidential – data as well as the data you yourself are generating.
Then there is the complexity of SSbD methodology itself. Although the overall SSbD impact is positive, we know about the drawbacks in terms of resources needed to generate the database – human resources, compiling and analysing data, need for multidisciplinary teams, etc. We know SSbD requires large resources and this increase costs and thus challenge competitiveness of the final products: we need a simpler version with cost effective and friendly tools that can be easily integrated by industries, SMEs or consultancies. We expect these concerns, as well as all the feedback of the last two-three years, to be acknowledged in the upcoming new iteration of the SSbD framework, planned for Autumn 2025.
Which is the BIORING novelty and added value?
Increase the performance of biocoatings in a cost-effective manner, to narrow the gap with fossil-based alternatives, using the SSbD approach as a tool to improve the overall innovation process. We apply it holistically, looking at the entire value chain to grant some level of transparency and continuous improvement. The other important aspect is, indeed, the value chain collaboration: our Consortium involve many stakeholders from the coating value chain, enabling process optimization, in alignment with Sustainability Developments Goals.
Compared to other projects I participated into, BIORING SSbD started with qualitative data and tools because at our low Technology Readiness Level (TRL) we faced a very low level of data – only some molecules or biomass, from which we generated all the process. A good balance of partner participation supports this, with different partners doing the safety aspect, the purely LCA aspect – especially on the environmental side –,the economic assessment using scale up modelling, etc. We complement a “tier approach” SSbD with a multi-dimensional aspect provided by a good balance of expertise, allowing us to get a quite complete assessment over the life of the project.
What do you like the most and what are your expectation in participating to the BIORING project?
The collaborative work, engaging all partners for the anticipatory safety and sustainability assessment, as each of them has some data we need, and keep interacting so everyone clearly understands what we want to do.
From the professional sustainability assessment aspect, this provides a great opportunity to learn about the biomass processing up to the final products. Facing the challenges in making bio-based products in a safe and sustainable way, we can apply BIORING learnings to other projects and apply a better approach in resolving future challenges.
In this way we contribute to the future bioeconomy, with a focus on the sustainability.
About
I have a background in designing sustainable products and materials for the circular economy, working in the evolving industrial and international setting among several value chains and countries.
Prior to joining Temas Solutions, I led a project on the sustainable plastics and packaging value chain at the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD). Now I’m specialised in sustainability and circularity assessment to guide industry stakeholders in the development of advanced materials, whether for automotive, aerospace, construction or electronics.
In BIORING I lead the Work Package 6 – Value chainsustainability assessment, in which we evaluate the developed materials regarding safety and sustainability compared to their standard fossil-based counterparts; so, we implement the SSbD framework that was published by the European Commission and we adapt it to the BIORING coatings.
