A new Ellen MacArthur Foundation report argues that the materials we can actually regrow, including cotton, wood, leather, and rubber, have been mostly left out of circular thinking. Closing that gap could be worth trillions of dollars and help meet a meaningful share of our climate targets.
A single-use cup made from corn and a jacket built to last 20 years from regeneratively grown cotton can both wear the label “bio-based” and count toward a country’s green-economy goals. Only one of them actually keeps materials in use. That gap is the subject of Circular by Nature, a recently released report from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation (EMF) prepared with the Circular Economy Coalition for Latin America and the Caribbean.
For years, circular-economy policy has focused on finite materials such as metals, plastics, and glass, the things we dig up once and cannot replace. Renewable materials we grow have mostly been treated as a swap-in for fossil-based stuff and little else. The report makes a simple case: treating renewable materials merely as organic substitutes for synthetics wastes their biggest advantage. Grown and used well, they can move through many lives and then return safely to the soil.
Two Green Ideas That Rarely Talk to Each Other
Start with the term. Bio-based materials are made entirely from renewable biological sources. Plants, animals, algae, and many other useful industrial materials require no fossil ingredients. Think wood, paper, cotton and other natural fibers, natural rubber, and leather. They feed huge industries: fashion, packaging, furniture, construction, and transportation.
To see how policy handles these materials, the EMF analyzed 13 national circular-economy strategies and 18 separate “bioeconomy” frameworks, the agriculture, forestry, and industrial policies that govern the production of goods. Despite appearing to be two sides of the circular coin, these two worlds — circular and bio-based economies — run on parallel tracks that rarely intersect, and each has a blind spot that mirrors the other.
Circular-economy strategies that mention bio-based materials at all treat them as substitutes for fossil inputs. They say little about how those materials are grown, reused, or returned to the ground. Bioeconomy policies have the reverse problem: they reward replacing fossil inputs with biological ones, but not keeping those materials in circulation. A bio-based single-use product can tick a bioeconomy box while working against circular goals. The result, the report concludes, is a generation of policy that optimized linear bio-based systems rather than redesigning them to enable reuse.
Both worlds also tend to overlook a quieter opportunity: secondary feedstocks, such as crop residues, sawdust, and food-processing byproducts, can become inputs for new materials rather than being burned or landfilled. With circular thinking, these organic materials can produce more products from the same acre of land, reducing the need to clear new ground. The report argues that capturing value like this should be designed into the system from the start, not bolted on at the end.
Renewable Comes With a Catch
“Renewable” is not the same as limitless. Bio-based materials are replenished only when the ecosystems that produce them are given the space and time to regrow. When extraction outpaces recovery, soil degrades, forests fall, and land is converted, making a renewable resource finite as the ecosystem loses its productive capacity. Swapping a fossil material for a biological one, in other words, is not automatically a win. It depends on land use, local ecology, and the full life cycle.
Earth911’s reporting bears this out. Many plant-based “vegan leathers” still rely on a plastic coating for durability, which undercuts the “eco-friendly” pitch. And compostable bioplastics generally break down only inside industrial composting facilities, an infrastructure that most communities still lack. The EMF report makes the same point: that an end-of-life claim like “compostable” means little unless the system to deliver it actually exists at scale.
What a Circular Bio-Economy Actually Looks Like
The report lays out five design rules for bio-based materials and products, held together by a sixth, social commitment. In plain terms, it recommends:
- Grown to heal the land. A name for materials that come from regenerative farming and forestry, using methods like agroforestry that rebuild soil and biodiversity, or from leftover residues, so new production does not clear more land. Shoppers need this guidance to choose regenerative products.
- Made without toxic ingredients. A product should use no “substances of concern” that poison the soil when the material returns to it.
- Built to last and be repaired. Companies should embrace durable, modular, fixable designs reinforced by rental, resale, and product-as-a-service models that keep goods in use.
- Reusable across industries. Industries need to break out of their supply-chain siloes. Wood, for example, might serve in construction, then become furniture, then yield energy from incineration only once its useful life is truly spent — that could be 100 years or more in a circular economy.
- Recoverable at end of life. The EMF urges that products be designed so materials can be recycled, composted, or returned to nutrients; again, the infrastructure for recovering these materials must exist.
Underneath all five sits an important social rule: fair and inclusive value chains. Bio-based production happens on land tied to farmers, rural and Indigenous communities, and even waste pickers. The report treats their rights, knowledge, and fair pay as part of the design, not an afterthought.
Picture a sneaker. Its cotton is grown regeneratively, its rubber tapped from Amazonian trees by local harvesters, its “leather” made from pineapple leaves or mushrooms, its dyes non-toxic. It is built to be resoled and repaired, rented or resold, and finally composted, and comes with a digital product passport, a scannable record of what it is made of and how to recover it, traveling alongside it.
It’s Already Happening
This is not a thought experiment. Gucci is investing in regenerative wool across roughly 115,000 hectares of pastureland through a partnership with the fiber brand NATIVA, runs repair centers to extend the life of its goods, and, according to the report, recently launched a denim line made with 76% regenerative cotton and 24% recycled fiber.
In Brazil, the fashion retailer Lojas Renner owns Repassa, a resale platform open to any brand. In 2023, the platform kept about 600,000 items out of landfills, saved an estimated 1.3 billion liters of water (roughly 340 million gallons) and avoided nearly 5,900 tons of carbon dioxide.
In India, the materials startup MYNUSCo turns crop waste that farmers would otherwise burn into bio-composite pellets that replace plastic. By the EMF’s account, it pays farmers two to three times what the biofuel market offers, roughly doubling some rural incomes, and supplies a network of small manufacturers.
The Dutch furniture maker Royal Ahrend, meanwhile, leases office furniture, refurbishes returned pieces for resale, and feeds wood scrap into recycled-content chipboard that can run as high as about 80% recycled material.
The Trillion-Dollar Case
The EMF argument is not charity, but economics. The report cites a World Economic Forum estimate that a “nature-positive” economic shift could represent about $10 trillion in opportunities worldwide each year by 2030. It also notes that the benefits of bio-based manufacturing tend to ripple outward: each direct job in the sector supports roughly 1.79 additional jobs across farming, logistics, and services.
There is a resilience payoff, too. Regenerative growing methods that improve soil health and water retention tend to produce steadier yields, and a more varied mix of crops lowers the risk that one bad harvest or price spike could disrupt an entire supply chain. For countries that mostly export raw commodities, the report argues, processing biomass into higher-value materials at home can diversify national income and create skilled jobs that shipping raw crops never will.
The climate math is just as striking. The European Commission estimates that bio-based products could save up to 2.5 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalent per year in the European Union by 2030. The report points to analysis suggesting a broader shift to a bioeconomy could deliver up to a third of the emissions cuts needed to hold warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Keeping materials in use longer eases pressure on land, while composting and regenerative growing pull carbon back into the soil.
Five Things Governments Can Change
To achieve an integrated bio-based circular economy, the report offers five connected policy moves.
- Set design standards that make regeneration a requirement, not a bonus, and require traceability.
- Rewrite “waste” rules so usable biomass is not dumped or burned by default, and open clear pathways for second uses.
- Shift the money by redirecting farm subsidies toward regenerative practices, cutting taxes on repair and reuse, charging producers fees scaled to how circular their products are, and phasing out subsidies that lock in linear production.
- Invest in the missing pieces: composting plants, biorefineries, fiber-to-fiber recycling, and the skills to run them.
- Coordinate across ministries and borders so definitions and certifications align, rather than multiplying compliance costs.
More than 100 countries now have circular-economy roadmaps or action plans, up about a third since 2024. The report’s point is that those plans will fall short of their potential as long as the renewable half of the material world keeps getting treated as an afterthought.
What You Can Do
- Buy for the long haul, and buy used. Choose durable, repairable goods, and shop resale platforms before buying new.
- Repair before you replace. Extending a product’s life is almost always lower-impact than recycling it.
- Read the fine print on “compostable” and “biodegradable.” Confirm a local facility actually accepts the item before you toss it in the bin. Check options through Earth911’s Recycling Search.
- Be skeptical of “plant-based” and “vegan” labels. When considering alternative leather and packaging, ask what the material actually is and whether it is coated in plastic.
- Support regenerative producers. Seek out brands and local farmers using practices that rebuild soil rather than deplete it.
- Back the policy plumbing. Composting infrastructure, right-to-repair laws, and producer-responsibility programs are what let individual choices add up.
Related Reading
- The Forest Stewardship Council’s Path to a Circular, Bio-Based Future
- Regenerative Agriculture to Restore Our Earth
- Bioplastics, Biodegradable Plastics, and Compostable Plastics: What’s the Difference?
- Shopping for Plant-Based Leather
Editor’s Note: Feature image courtesy of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation.
The post The Circular Economy Has a Blind Spot: The Stuff That Grows Back appeared first on Earth911.
