The European Commission recently unveiled a strategy for the bioeconomy. However, it appears that the Commission is not being entirely truthful. It quotes studies by its own scientific researchers incorrectly or in a highly biased manner. This means that the Council of the EU and the European Parliament are actually being given an unreliable document on which to base their assessment of new EU legislation.

According to the European Commission, the bioeconomy would generate €2.7 trillion or €2,700 billion and create 17.1 million jobs in the European Union. The bioeconomy encompasses activities that use sustainable raw materials to create added value. These figures appear to be unreliable. The Commission clearly engaged in cherry-picking and cites figures that have been taken completely out of context.

What’s more, these figures only exist on paper, not in reality. Nevertheless, the Commission claims that the economic potential of the bioeconomy is not being tapped. The Commission believes that the bioeconomy could grow by 18 per cent each year. At least, that is what they claimed in the new strategy published at the end of December, namely the EU Bioeconomy Strategy.

This strategy concerns biomass and the conversion of that biomass into food, products and energy. Biomass is organic material derived from plants or animals. According to the Commission, the EU Bioeconomy Strategy is necessary to achieve the climate, energy and biodiversity targets by 2030.

This written strategy is a new version of those from 2012 and 2018. According to the Commission, “significant progress” has been made, particularly regarding the circular economy. It is EU policy and a so-called “economic model” that aims to keep materials and products in use for as long as possible through design, reuse, repair and recycling. The aim is to reduce the amount of waste and, above all, to reduce the raw materials required and emissions.

To this end, the Commission introduced an EU Circular Economy Action Plan in 2015. A new version was published in 2020, which was to become a crucial building block of the Green Deal. At the same time, the Commission is working on an EU Circular Economy Act, a law that aims to impose policies on the bioeconomy and circularity. They want to introduce this law in 2026. From 2026 onwards, a single market for recycled raw materials should be created throughout the EU.

In August 2025, the Commission therefore issued a call for examples of successful applications that could serve as evidence for the proposed “sustainable” policy and legislation. This call for feedback ran until 6 November 2025 via the Commission’s website called Have Your Say.

The latter was nothing more than a way for Commission-subsidised NGOs to influence policy. Of the 230 organisations that completed the questionnaire, most were lobby groups. The most important was the European Environmental Bureau (EEB), a green-left NGO or lobby group that supports the Green Deal and is used by the Commission as a kind of PR and events agency for the Green Deal.

FEAD, the European Waste Management Association, the lobby group for private waste companies and the recycling sector, was also among the participants. These are multinationals that support the policy, are keen to receive subsidies and want to see legislation evolve in their favour. This is the lobby group for companies such as Veolia, Suez, Renewi and Indaver. Renewi (formerly Van Gansewinkel) and Indaver (once a company owned by the Flemish government and now owned by Fernand Huts) are multinationals in the collection and processing of household and industrial waste.

Across the EU, barely 1,000 organisations or citizens expressed an interest in providing feedback, and less than a quarter of them, namely 230, responded to the Commission’s questionnaire.

Most participants therefore had a very clear self-interest or ideological agenda. A not inconsiderable number of them also receive subsidies through the Commission’s LIFE programme. LIFE projects that put the Commission’s objectives into practice. Generously subsidised projects to prove that biomass can be converted into valuable materials, energy or services for the benefit of the climate.

It is no coincidence that the Commission therefore highlighted one of these projects: the GR4SS project. This is a project to use grass cut along roadsides (i.e. by public authorities or their subcontractors) in fermentation plants to produce biogas (methane), fibres and potting soil.

This Dutch project is said to have demonstrated that it can be a very lucrative alternative to fossil fuels. Such digesters could produce 25 billion litres of gas in the Netherlands alone. According to the Commission, this is equivalent to 125,800 tonnes of CO2 emissions.

This roadside grass fermentation project claimed that between 300,000 and 450,000 tonnes of grass are collected annually from roadside verges and nature reserves, often owned by government agencies. The project processed 30,000 tonnes of Frisian roadside grass. The consortium behind the project received a subsidy of no less than €2,261,231 for this in 2022.

Subsidies are also flowing freely in Belgium, such as for Bermg(r)as, which aims to demonstrate the potential for biogas production. Sometimes the subsidy recipients claim that they can supply tens of thousands of households with electricity using gas from roadside grass, while other times they point to a product such as potting soil.

Of course, they do not tell the whole story. The post-treatment of the digestate costs up to 60% of the total fermentation costs, which makes co-fermentation with roadside grass economically unattractive. Other projects, such as Graskracht, were unable to demonstrate that the expensive processing is better than traditional composting. The risks of fraud would also be considerable because they add waste to improve fermentation.

Nor is it very ecological. Roadside grass often contains litter and sand, which causes problems during wet fermentation and requires additional cleaning with an environmental impact.

This did not prevent the Commission from providing massive subsidies to such projects. However, a special report by the European Court of Auditors showed that there is hardly any control, personnel costs are exorbitantly high, and the results are not reproducible. In most cases, there were even no business plans. EU officials now believe that subsidising, for example, fungi to remediate soil contaminated with fossil fuels may be more interesting than doing so in the traditional way. That is, by burning “total petroleum hydrocarbons” (TPHs).

The final text of the bioeconomy strategy that the Commission submitted to the Council of the EU and the European Parliament on 27 November 2025 was subtitled “A Strategic Framework for a Competitive and Sustainable EU Bioeconomy”. Questions remain about both competitiveness and sustainability.

The figures in the document are highly speculative and rather creatively selected. However, readers need to consult the footnotes to realise this. After all, the famous €2.7 trillion in turnover and 17 million jobs come from a publication by the Commission’s own services. They come from a JRC publication that appeared in 2025. A document of barely 8 pages.

The authors are economists Jesús M. Lasarte-López and Robert M’barek. They work for the Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) in Seville. They work for the Commission’s Directorate-General for Sustainable Resources. Those eight pages contain estimates based on economic statistics (based on NACE codes per activity that companies must report to the National Bank).

The 2.7 trillion euro in added value is the upper limit of an estimate ranging from 1.9 to 2.7 trillion euro in the selectively cited publication. The 17.1 million jobs turn out to be the number of jobs in 2023 that they were able to link to their broadest definition of the bioeconomy. This represents 7.9 per cent of all employment in the European Union. And those 17.1 million workers accounted for barely 5 per cent of the EU’s gross domestic product (GDP) during that period. That is 863 billion euros. Anyone who can do a little maths will immediately realise that, in its wishful thinking, the Commission sees the value of all production by companies that it already counts as part of the bioeconomy doubling or tripling by 2030. That is within four years.

And there is more to be disputed, because the two authors themselves wrote that their bioeconomy accounted for 583 billion in added value, half of which came from food, beverages and other processed agricultural products. They then add all kinds of service sectors to arrive at 42 to 60 million jobs and that famous 1.9 to 2.7 trillion euro.

In short, the Commission is particularly selective in its use of sources in its strategy and is not entirely honest when quoting or summarising the figures produced by its own scientific services. Moreover, they include the entire agricultural and food sector in the bioeconomy. Based on this EU Bioeconomy Strategy, it is impossible for the European Parliament and the Council of the EU to make a reliable assessment of the EU legislation proposed by the European Commission, such as the EU Circular Economy Act and other parts of the Green Deal.