On 13 October 2026, ANIPH and MAGICBIOMAT held their fourth joint webinar, “From Lab to Application: Exploring Bio-Based Polymers and Their Emerging Uses”. The session looked at what it takes to move bio-based polymers out of the laboratory and into real products, from wound dressings and packaging to adhesives and coatings. Golnoosh Abdeali (Technological University of the Shannon) moderated.

PHA is not a material for everything

During her keynote, Nydia Badillo (Helian Polymers) explained that combining different PHA building blocks lets you tune a material’s properties for injection moulding, film extrusion, 3D printing and more. She also stressed that prevention comes first: PHA makes most sense where biodegradation is genuinely needed, such as agricultural mulch films. Limited supply, prices that are not yet competitive with fossil-based plastics, and processing that converters find unfamiliar are still the main barriers to wider uptake.

ANIPH: materials for places where waste systems fail

Dionisio Poveda (CETEC) then brought the discussion to the setting ANIPH was designed for: humanitarian crises, where medical supplies and packaging are needed urgently and waste management has often broken down. He explained how the consortium is building two biodegradable products, a wound dressing and a flexible packaging system. CETBIO produces PHBV, a type of PHA, by fermenting agri-food waste. CETEC then adjusts the formulation. Two results stood out. A bio-based nucleating agent made the material stronger and more thermally stable. Raising the hydroxyvalerate content of the PHBV from 10% to 30% made it noticeably more flexible, which is what flexible packaging needs. At the University of Granada, these formulations have already been 3D-printed into flexible meshes, and early tests show they are compatible with probiotic cellulose, which is added to help prevent infection. The final step will be to find out whether the materials disappear as intended: the Agricultural University of Athens will test their biodegradation in soil, freshwater and marine environments.

MAGICBIOMAT: the industry reality check

Kristina İnceoğlu Petrasova (Organik Kimya) closed the presentations with the view of an established polymer producer. Her company combines recycled, bio-based and biodegradable building blocks to make its products more sustainable without losing the performance customers expect. Her figures were sobering. Certified bio-based raw materials can cost up to five times as much as conventional ones, and in her experience regulation, more than market demand, is still what drives change.

One shared conclusion

The three talks approached the topic from different angles, but they reached the same conclusion: no single organisation can make this transition alone. Bringing bio-based polymers into real use depends on industry, research centres and EU projects working closely together, which is exactly why ANIPH and MAGICBIOMAT run this joint series.

The ANIPH–MAGICBIOMAT webinar series continues with the next and final session, scheduled for the first week of December and titled “Bio-Plastics & Policy: Enabling Biodegradation in Practice”. Stay tune to discover more!

Did you miss the forth session? Watch it here!

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Photo by Trnava University on Unsplash