The Bio-based and Biodegradable Industries Association (BBIA) launched a cross-party campaign calling on the government to review the tax, regulation and waste rules that it says leave home-grown bio-based products more expensive than the fossil-based goods they could replace, warning that Britain is the only G7 nation without a current national bioeconomy strategy.

The campaign, the BioRevolution Coalition, centres on a public petition on the UK Parliament petitions website and has drawn together hundreds of organisations behind a five-point plan for government. The BBIA points to research showing that switching 30 per cent of UK chemical-industry feedstock to biomass could generate up to £204 billion in annual revenue and save more than 5.2 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent each year.

The campaign has received parliamentary backing from MPs including George Freeman, the Conservative MP and UK trade envoy who previously served as minister of state for science and technology, and the Labour MP Rachael Maskell, with support from Lord Markham.

"Too often we invent the technologies of the future, only to watch them scale overseas," said Freeman, who has previously helped secure engineering biology as a priority technology for government. "The next step is ensuring that investment translates into commercial success by creating a clear, joined-up framework for the bioeconomy."

The global bioeconomy, which spans plastics, textiles, chemicals, fuels and packaging made from renewable biological resources rather than fossil oil and gas, is projected to be worth more than £30 trillion by 2050. Engineering biology is named as one of six frontier technologies in the government's Modern Industrial Strategy. In the UK the sector already supports more than 1,200 businesses, generated £12.5 billion in revenue in 2024 and employs around 20,000 people.

The Coalition argues the bottleneck is policy rather than science. The government has committed £2 billion over ten years to engineering biology and the wider bioeconomy, yet fewer than one in ten of the bio-based innovations it funds reach commercial production in the UK. Current rules can make bringing a bio-based product to market around 45 per cent slower and twice as expensive as a fossil-based equivalent, which the Coalition says costs the country more than 4,000 skilled jobs and between £300 million and £500 million in economic value each year.

Britain withdrew its Growing the Bioeconomy strategy in 2021 and has not replaced it, leaving it the only G7 country without a current national plan. By contrast, 22 European countries have adopted or are developing dedicated strategies, the United States mandates federal procurement of more than 7,000 certified bio-based products, and Japan is targeting a £500 billion bioeconomy market by 2030.

The Coalition has set out a five-point plan for government.

• Appoint a single Minister of State with end-to-end accountability for the bioeconomy, mirroring the arrangements for net zero and space.
• Align policy, regulation and taxation with where a product's carbon comes from, not only what happens to it at end of life.
• Adopt a common carbon accounting standard for comparing bio-based and fossil-based products.
• Use public procurement to create early markets, starting with an NHS pilot for bio-based alternatives to high-volume single-use products.
• Back first-of-a-kind biomanufacturing plants with co-funded scale-up capital through the National Wealth Fund and British Business Bank.

"The technology is ready, the businesses are ready, and the economic opportunity is enormous," said Dr Jen Vanderhoven, chief executive of the BBIA. "Too many British innovations are being held back by outdated policy frameworks that make it harder and more expensive to bring bio-based products to market."

Members of the public can sign the petition on the UK Parliament petitions website, with further detail at biorevolution.uk.