Enable-BIO

Overview

The Irish Government’s vision for the bioeconomy stretches beyond policy compliance on meeting climate change targets and becoming a global leader in the bioeconomy to help support a modern sustainable society. The governance pillar is therefore important to ensure the policy, sectoral and regulatory coherence across all the sectors involved in bioeconomy development. However, the regulatory framework in agri-food waste management is currently complex.

The Enable-BIO project would provide a roadmap towards the creation of an enabling environment for innovations in the agri-food waste biobased value chains. The project would first provide a database on the state of the art on the agri-food waste regulatory framework and the regulatory gaps which need to be filled for the advancement of the bioeconomy based on a systematic literature review. This would provide an understanding of critical definitions, regulatory instruments (licences, permits, vision documents etc) and the impact of such on the management of agri-food waste streams.

The project will identify and analyse good practices from other countries which can be adopted in Ireland. Interviews and co-design workshops would be used to explore in-depth regulatory barriers and recommendations to overcome such for business innovations involved in agri-food waste streams.

The evidence from all the research activities would be used to build the road map to create an enabling environment. This would help inform policymakers in creating a policy framework which is tailormade to the Irish context to increase efficiency in waste management.