With polymeric material consumption constantly increasing and plastic waste accumulating and contaminating our land, water, and air, we are now facing a global challenge that has never been more pressing. The emerging concept of a circular bioeconomy, unravels opportunities to create a sustainable society that uses widely available bioresources while simultaneously lowering the net carbon footprint. Some of the most promising avenues currently studied in the field of sustainable polymers are to substitute fossil-derived monomers with equivalents derived from abundant and renewable biomass, utilize natural biopolymers, biosynthesized hierarchical structures or entire organisms, redesign manufacturing processes to be less wasteful and consume less energy, integrate synthetic biology tools, and develop viable end-of-life strategies. Yet, for biomass-based materials there are important remaining fundamental challenges including the fractionation, improving extraction or conversion yields, handling, and low-waste and low-energy processing, adaptation to advanced manufacturing methods. In addition, understanding of constituent materials and structures, and embracing innovations using bottom-up platforms such as cell cultures or protein design to tailor the structure and properties of biopolymer-based materials present an alternative and less explored pathway.This symposium will be centered around these topics, which require materials scientists, chemical and process engineers, synthetic biologists, environmental and bioresource scientists and chemists to collaboratively provide solutions to address this multifaceted global challenge.

biological biological synthesis (assembly) polymer protein