This October, I traveled to Monterrey, Mexico, for a meeting of the Global Bioeconomy Alliance (GBA) at Tecnológico de Monterrey. For the past 20 years, much of my research has focused on how we can use land, water, genetic material, and modern technology to produce fuels and chemicals from renewable resources. Most of the conferences I’ve attended have focused on economics and policy. We talked a great deal about the promise of the bioeconomy, but I often came home knowing little about how people were putting these ideas into practice. In Monterrey, I got to meet some of those people.
Monterrey is an industrial city. As one local told me, “If you want production, come to Monterrey. If you want a vacation, go to Cancún.” Monterrey has its share of factories, tall buildings, and pollution, but it also has its charms. I especially liked the great city square, with its museum, greenery, statues, and waterfalls. A beautiful church stands nearby. When we visited, the city was still decorated for the Day of the Dead, a joyful occasion when families welcome back the spirits of loved ones. Colorful ornaments, pictures, and works of art were everywhere.
Our host, Tecnológico de Monterrey, is a highly regarded private university that aspires to be Mexico’s MIT. For me, the highlight of the conference was talking with people whose work brought the different colors of the bioeconomy to life. I use green for agriculture and forestry, blue for algae and aquaculture, and white for biomanufacturing. Brown is the color I associate with circularity, where the waste from one activity becomes the raw material for another.
Profiles of creative leaders
Pilar Parada is a biochemist from Chile whose work gave me a particularly good example of the brown bioeconomy. What interested me about Pilar was how she carried her university research into industry. After earning her doctorate in molecular biology, she joined BioSigma, where she eventually became general manager. She helped the company use bacteria on an industrial scale to recover copper from ores that contained too little metal for conventional methods. She also became a visiting professor at the University of Chile, bringing that industrial experience back to the classroom.
Pilar now leads a project called Cobalto Verde. Her team works with tailings, the crushed rock left behind when copper ore is processed. Along with copper, the rock can contain cobalt, a metal used in electric vehicle batteries. The difficulty is that both metals can be trapped inside a mineral called pyrite. In the laboratory, Pilar’s team uses bacteria that get their energy from the iron and sulfur in pyrite. As the bacteria help break down the mineral, the metals dissolve into a liquid from which the team can recover them. Removing the pyrite could also reduce the risk of acidic runoff polluting nearby streams.
What I found most striking was how many useful products could come from a single pile of discarded rock. The cobalt could go into batteries and the copper back into manufacturing, all without opening another mine. Even the sand left after the metals are recovered might find a use in concrete or roads.
Professor Volker Sieber helped found the Global Bioeconomy Alliance and now chairs it. He studied chemistry in Germany and the United States, conducted research at Caltech, and worked in the chemical industry before becoming a professor at the Technical University of Munich (TUM). His work illustrates the white bioeconomy, where biology helps manufacturers make products from renewable materials.
One of his contributions was to show how enzymes, the proteins that speed up chemical reactions in living things, can work together outside a cell. Think of an assembly line. Each enzyme makes one change to a molecule, and the next picks up where it left off. By choosing the sequence, scientists can turn plant sugars into useful chemicals. In another project, Sieber’s team found a use for the turpentine oil left over when a mill turns wood into pulp. They turned a component of the oil into a strong plastic of the kind used in ski bindings and car parts.
Sieber is an outstanding educator. As the first rector of TUM’s Straubing campus, he helped shape a curriculum for a new generation of bioeconomy scholars. His graduate students learn to redesign enzymes with an industrial use in mind. I was impressed by how well they presented their work in Monterrey. I could also see Sieber’s influence in the meeting itself. The Alliance gives students, researchers, and people in industry a place to learn from one another.
Professor Mike Allen’s work on the blue bioeconomy brought to mind the advice I heard in Monterrey about vacationing in Cancún. On Mexico’s Caribbean coast, great mats of Sargassum, a floating seaweed, can wash ashore and rot. The smell alone can drive visitors away. Allen studies algae at the University of Exeter in England. He co-founded Seaweed Generation, now SeaGen, to intercept excess seaweed before it reaches the beach.
His team built AlgaRay, a robot inspired by the manta ray. It gathers seaweed at the surface and carries it down about 200 meters. By then, water pressure has compressed the little gas pockets that keep Sargassum afloat. The robot can release its load and return to the surface while the seaweed sinks on its own. Sargassum absorbs carbon as it grows. The climate benefit depends on how much of that carbon stays in the deep ocean and for how long. Researchers also need to understand how sinking the seaweed affects life on the seabed.
Allen has also explored what coastal communities might do with Sargassum that does wash ashore. Using heat and pressure, his team turned seaweed from a Mexican beach into a liter of bio-oil that could be refined into fuel. His group has also tested seaweed extracts as potential fertilizers. I like the fact that Allen enlisted his children to collect seaweed for experiments on a beach in Devon. He brings that same enthusiasm to the harder job of starting a company and testing a robot at sea. It takes that kind of curiosity and drive to build a new sector.
Professor Wim Soetaert of Ghent University in Belgium saw how competing firms could work together to scale up production in the white bioeconomy. Before becoming a professor, he spent 13 years directing research in the sugar and starch industries in Germany and France. He knew how expensive it was to find out whether a process that worked in a flask would also work in a factory. Few of Belgium’s emerging biotech firms could afford the equipment and expertise on their own, but they could share both and still compete on what they sold.
Wim acted on that insight by founding Flanders Biobased Valley, a partnership among the university, businesses, and public authorities. He then helped secure European funding to turn an old fire station in the port of Ghent into the Bio Base Europe Pilot Plant. There, companies can work with experienced engineers and test their processes in progressively larger tanks before deciding whether to build a factory of their own.
Inbiose, a company Wim co-founded, uses microbes to make some of the complex sugars found naturally in human milk. These sugars can be added to infant formula. At the pilot plant, the team tested the process in a 15,000-liter tank, producing enough for prospective customers to try. Another team used the same facility to test whether microbes could turn waste gas from a steel mill into ethanol. What I admire about Wim as an academic and an entrepreneur is that he looked beyond his own company. By giving others a place to test what they could make from very different raw materials, he helped a whole sector grow in Ghent.
Professor Alon Gorodetsky of the University of California, Irvine, gave me another way to think about the blue bioeconomy. Mike Allen sees a raw material for fuel in seaweed; Alon sees a design for new materials in the skin of a squid. Trained in materials science and chemistry, he studies how squid change their appearance. In one experiment, his group made thin coatings from reflectin, a protein found in squid skin. They could adjust which wavelengths the coatings reflected, shifting from visible light to infrared.
Another idea came from watching how a squid changes color. Muscles in its skin stretch tiny sacs of pigment, changing how much of each color shows. Alon’s team borrowed that principle to make a flexible film dotted with patches of metal. When the film is relaxed, the patches sit close together and reflect heat. Stretch it and the patches pull apart, letting more heat through. The researchers wrapped the film around a cup of coffee and showed that they could change how fast it cooled simply by adjusting the stretch.
They also tested a sleeve that let the wearer adjust how much heat escaped from a forearm. I find that a promising idea for clothing. Imagine being able to change how warm a sleeve feels without rolling it up. The film was made of metal and plastic. What the squid supplied was the idea for how to arrange them.
Professor William Chen of Nanyang Technological University in Singapore works where the green bioeconomy of agriculture meets the brown bioeconomy of reuse. What interested me was how much value he saw in the wet pulp left over from making tofu or soy milk. Known as okara, the pulp still contains protein and fiber. But it spoils quickly, and its coarse texture and sour taste limit its appeal. Much of it goes to waste or ends up as animal feed.
Working with a Japanese food manufacturer, Chen and his colleagues grew oyster mushroom mycelium through the pulp. Mycelium is the network of fine threads that makes up the fungus. Over eleven days, the threads spread through the moist okara and released enzymes that broke down some of its fiber. In their laboratory study, the fermented pulp had more protein per gram of dry material and more of the compounds that give food a savory taste.
For a tofu maker, the prospect is a second food ingredient from the same crop. Whether people will want to eat it, and whether it will pay to produce it, are still open questions. Chen also directs Singapore’s Future Ready Food Safety Hub and has helped bring his university and the World Health Organization together to improve how food risks are assessed. I appreciate that breadth. Recovering nutrients from food waste is one achievement. Making something people trust and want on their plates is another.
Professor Kristala L. Jones Prather approaches the white bioeconomy from inside the fermentation tank. She earned her doctorate in chemical engineering at Berkeley, worked on ways to manufacture medicines at Merck, and now heads the chemical engineering department at MIT. Her team often starts with the chemical it wants to make and works backward to a raw material such as sugar. At each step, the researchers look for an enzyme that can do the job.
Prather’s team developed a way to use bacteria to make glucaric acid, a building block for detergents and nylon. They gave E. coli three genes, one from yeast, one from a mouse, and one from another bacterium. Each gene supplied instructions for a different step in turning sugar into the acid. The challenge was timing. The bacteria also needed sugar to multiply. If they started making acid too soon, there would be too few cells to produce much of it. If they kept multiplying too long, little sugar would be left for production.
Prather’s team designed a genetic switch that responds to a chemical signal the cells release. As the bacteria multiply, the signal builds up. Once it reaches a certain level, the switch directs more sugar toward making glucaric acid. Prather’s work illustrates why mathematical models matter in designing processes for the bioeconomy. Here, sugar is the feedstock. A model can compare what happens if the bacteria switch earlier or later and help identify the timing that yields the most glucaric acid from a given amount of sugar.
I came home from Monterrey convinced that an economist needs to know some biology and physics. Hearing about the work underway in Europe, Africa, and Latin America was a welcome reminder that Berkeley is not the center of the universe. I hope more researchers from China, India, and more American universities will join the Alliance. Together we could develop a shared curriculum, pursue research across borders, and help investors judge which ideas are ready to test on a larger scale. In my talk I argued that regulators should weigh a technology’s benefits against its costs and risks, a view many colleagues shared. We also need policies that reward people for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and public investment in places like the pilot plant in Ghent, where researchers and businesses can experiment together. I left Monterrey more optimistic about what the bioeconomy can do to slow climate change and tackle problems like food waste and water pollution in ways that make economic sense.
