How the RSB Community is Turning Vision into Action to Advance a Circular Bioeconomy

The promise of a circular bioeconomy isn’t a distant aspiration: it’s a practical pathway to cutting carbon, restoring ecosystems, and securing resilient supply chains. Fossil-based feedstocks are replaced with renewable, responsibly sourced materials, and waste is designed out so that valuable resources are kept in use. At the Roundtable on Sustainable Biomaterials (RSB), we are turning that promise into a reality that delivers measurable impact today.

Our globally recognized sustainability framework, co-developed by our multi-stakeholder membership community of industry, civil society, and research organizations, serves as a lighthouse, guiding companies and governments to scale solutions and turn ambition into action. From our work as a Global Executing Partner supporting the work on alternative materials with Plastic Reboot, a global initiative that tackles plastic pollution at its source, to our membership platforms that bring together various stakeholder groups to define sustainability standards and best practices in the chemicals, shipping, and aviation sectors, RSB is turning vision into action to advance a circular bioeconomy. Much of this progress has been pioneered in aviation, where new supply chain tools, feedstock mapping, and sustainability safeguards are already in practice, but these actions and the lessons may also be transferable across other sectors such as plastics and chemicals.

The Bioplastic Feedstock Alliance’s (BFA) Vision Statement: Aligning Toward a Circular Bioeconomy similarly calls for all actors to collaborate across sectors, leverage supply chains, share infrastructure, advance technology, and adopt robust sustainability metrics. In this publication, the BFA developed recommendations for key groups including policymakers, business, nongovernmental organizations, and financial institutions. These recommendations are already being put into practice across the RSB community and below are real-world examples of the RSB community implementing the BFA’s recommendations for businesses to advance circular bioeconomy solutions:

Cross-industry collaboration:
In Southeast Asia, RSB’s recently completed Decarbonising Aviation Sustainably project demonstrates the power of collaboration. Airlines, fuel producers, policymakers, and agricultural stakeholders partnered to map sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) feedstock opportunities from agricultural residues. Supported by Boeing and Standard Chartered, the project identified that the region could produce about 45.7 million tonnes of SAF annually by 2050, equal to 12% of global SAF demand, and reduce aviation’s life-cycle CO2 emissions by up to 84%. Around 75% of feedstock comes from low-risk agricultural and post-consumer waste (e.g. rice husks, cassava, sugarcane residues), offering rural communities new income streams and stimulating regional economies, all while adhering to the RSB’s strict criteria to safeguard biodiversity, water resources, and food security.

Leveraging supply chains:
Supply chains are one of the most effective levers for scaling impact. This is most evident in transition tools like book and claim. Through the RSB Book & Claim Registry, companies can transparently track and transfer sustainability attributes across their value chains. In 2024, the Registry saw over 22,000 tonnes of neat SAF registered, while Airbus piloted a Facilitator Account role and SkyNRG registered the first co-processed SAF. Already established in aviation, RSB’s Book & Claim Programme is expanding to the chemicals sector. These steps send clear signals to suppliers that access to markets depends on meeting robust sustainability criteria.

Co-locating operations (industrial ecology):
Greatview Planet exemplifies the power of linking industrial systems to reduce waste and boost circularity. It uses BioVerno naphtha, a byproduct of tall oil, itself a residue from pulp mills, which is transformed into bio-attributed polymer using renewable wind energy. This polymer, certified under the RSB standard and integrated into Greatview’s production in Germany, demonstrates how one industry's waste can cleanly and efficiently feed another’s process; minimizing fossil inputs and maximizing resource recovery.

Advancing technological innovation:
Through the Improving Livelihoods through a Sustainable Bioeconomy program with Boeing, RSB is piloting an Impact & Incentive Programme that rewards sustainable production. This operates via:

• A methodology to quantify sustainability performance using impact indicators, enabling measurable tracking of outcomes such as soil health, biodiversity, water security, or carbon sequestration.
• A market-based mechanism where buyers and end-users can purchase in-sector sustainability claims, applying them to their corporate targets, and in turn providing direct financial incentives to producers to continue investing in biocircular practices.

These tools help bridge the cost gap between biocircular and fossil-based products and stimulate technological and process innovation. The RSB Academy concurrently supports scaling through training on life-cycle assessment and certification tools, equipping companies with the technical capabilities to adopt these circular economy solutions efficiently.

Adopting robust sustainability metrics:
RSB is contributing to shaping what sustainability means for next-generation plastic alternatives. Our flagship standard, the RSB Principles & Criteria, forms the foundation, providing a comprehensive set of environmental and social safeguards. As one of the Executing Partners for Plastic Reboot, an initiative supported by the Global Environment Facility and co-led by the United Nations Environment Programme and World Wildlife Fund, we benchmark existing standards, identify regional gaps, and co-create guidance and tools with stakeholders across the plastics value chain. The aim is to provide a harmonized approach to sustainability metrics that businesses can adopt to credibly assess and improve their plastic alternatives, ensuring they are not simply shifting environmental burdens from one place to another.

Scaling a circular bioeconomy requires coordinated action across all actors. Businesses cannot do it alone. The BFA’s Bioeconomy Vision Statement provides recommendations for key actors to do this, and RSB and its community’s work offer proof that credible, practical implementation is already underway. WWF’s earlier blog, Transitioning to a Circular Bioeconomy to Meet Future Demands, explored why that transformation is so urgent and the examples here show how it is already taking shape.

The challenge is to scale these efforts across industries and geographies, ensuring that a circular bioeconomy works for people and nature alike. Join the RSB community at this year’s RSB Annual Conference, and let’s learn how to scale together.