The European Interreg project AlpLinkBioEco comes successfully to its end in April 2021. The final conference of the project was conducted on the 31st of March 2021 and attracted over 160 participants from different parts of Europe. AlpLinkBioEco, of which BIOPRO Baden-Württemberg is a partner, has been running for three years (2018-2021) as part of the EU-Strategy for the Alpine Region (EUSALP) and was funded with 2.291.020 euros by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).

The main goal of the project was to develop an interregional cooperation in the Alpine Space to enhance innovative bio-based value chains operating in the following sectors: agriculture, wood, chemicals and food/pharma packaging. AlpLinkBioEco dealt with the issues of the circular bio-based economy, considered an engine for competitiveness, bearers of added value for businesses and crucial elements to achieve the objectives of the EU Green Deal and the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations.

To support the transition from a fossil fuel-based economy to a bio-based economy, an interactive database - the Value Chain Generator (VCG) - was created. It allows the mapping of hundreds of clusters and sectoral associations as well as thousands of companies and subsequently supports the development of new bio-based value chains and opportunities for an industrial symbiosis at the local, national and transnational level. With the end of the project, this online database will be available to third parties under a specific software license.¹

“The whole work, which has been done during the project AlpLinkBioEco, now has to be brought to a much broader scale. A big process of transformation has to start, in order not to just bring companies together within a value chain, but to transform the whole economy in Europe. Therefore, the Value Chain Generator is coming just in time. We have to start a transnational dialog resulting in the dedicated actions. Also, the digitalization potential for resilient bio-based value chains has to be exploited. The samples have been developed and now we need to roll them out. We have the Alpine Space community and the EUSALP AlpGov 2 activities. So, how can we get things managed? We need ambassadors - an instigator group - working with the Value Chain Generator to move into companies and clusters to show what the big challenges but also the opportunities are that can be derived from the bioeconomy in this very big transformational process”, said Prof. Dr. Ralf Kindervater, CEO of BIOPRO Baden-Württemberg GmbH, at the final conference of the project.

Furthermore, important inputs from the institutional and industrial stakeholders of the Alpine regions involved in the project were collected. Based on these data, an action scheme - the Joint Masterplan - was defined to stimulate the development of the bioeconomy in the Alpine Space.