This event has now finished.
This event has been postponed.
  • Date and time: Tuesday 15 February 2022, 6.30pm to 7.30pm
  • Location: Online only
  • Audience: Open to alumni, staff, students, the public
  • Admission: Free admission, booking required

Event details

One Planet Week event

What is the Bioeconomy? And why this is an important economic opportunity for the Yorkshire region? Find out how the Biorenewables Development Centre (BDC) is working with local businesses to develop novel bio-based products to make this opportunity a reality.

BDC is an open access pilot scale biorefinery facility set up at the University of York to help businesses evaluate the use of sustainable raw materials, including plants, microbes and different types of waste streams, as feedstocks for novel bio-based products. The centre has facilities for scaling up innovative new processes to investigate the feasibility of ideas that look promising on a smaller scale and works with a wide range of natural products including oils, waxes, flavours, fragrances, medicinal chemicals and fibres. With over 30 staff and a mix of office, lab and warehouse-based facilities, the BDC has now worked with over 400 businesses and has built a strong pipeline of commercial and grant-funded R+D projects. Many of these projects are collaborations that bring together university expertise and business need with the BDC facilitating the evaluation of novel bio-based processes and products in the emerging bioeconomy sector.

Dr Joe Ross

Dr Joe Ross is the Director of the Biorenewables Development Centre. He has over 30 years R&D laboratory and management experience working on the development of novel microbial and plants as the raw materials for bio-based products. He has spent the last twelve years focused on business development in the biorenewables sector and led the establishment of the BDC ensuring both feedstock and process development are represented in the Centre’s activities. Joe has also played a key role in establishing BioVale as a bioeconomy innovation cluster across Yorkshire and Humberside in the North of England.