A new pilot plant in Zoetermeer offers companies the opportunity to develop, test and scale up new circular and bio-based building materials. TNO’s BioBuilt is set to contribute to making the construction sector more sustainable and tackling the housing shortage.
The pilot plant was opened earlier this week by Minister Elanor Boekholt-O’Sullivan of Housing and Spatial Planning. The Netherlands faces the challenge of building a large number of homes in a short space of time to tackle the housing shortage. At the same time, the construction sector must meet increasingly stringent climate and circularity targets. Traditional building materials account for a significant proportion of CO₂ emissions and raw material use in the construction sector.
Wood fibres, crops and other natural waste streams
According to TNO, climate-neutral construction requires alternative building materials that are renewable, sequester CO₂ and are less dependent on scarce raw materials. Bio-based materials such as wood and insulation and sheet materials made from wood fibres, crops and other natural waste streams can play an important role in this.
TNO BioBuilt focuses, amongst other things, on processing such waste streams into high-quality building materials. In this way, the plant aims to help develop innovations into large-scale applications in homes and other buildings.
Scaling up production is often a challenge in practice. For example, companies do not always have the right facilities, expertise or investment capacity to develop and test new materials on an industrial scale.
Mitigating risks
BioBuilt aims to provide a solution and assist stakeholders in this regard. At the pilot plant, companies can experiment with aspects such as product composition and production processes, validate products and carry out demonstrations before investing in large-scale production lines themselves. TNO BioBuilt aims to eliminate risks for companies and accelerate the market launch of sustainable products.
Minister Elanor Boekholt-O’Sullivan: “We want to build more, faster and better, so that people can move into a lovely home sooner. This requires new ways of building and cleaner building materials. Natural, or bio-based, materials fit in very well with this. The challenge now is to scale up production so that these materials can actually be used in our homes. TNO BioBuilt is helping companies take that step. That is why I am delighted with the opening of this TNO BioBuilt research and production facility.”
Missing link
“At TNO BioBuilt, innovative solutions can be scaled up for practical application. It thus forms the missing link between technological development and large-scale application, and that is precisely what innovation is,” says Machteld de Kroon, managing director of the TNO unit Mobility & Built Environment.
The focus includes the reuse of waste wood for high-quality applications, such as doors, window frames and structural timber components. Research is also being carried out into how fibres derived from waste streams such as tomato and pepper plants, as well as pruning waste, can be used for insulation and sheet materials. These waste streams are available on a large scale in the Netherlands. For example, approximately 1.5 million cubic metres of waste wood is incinerated annually and 500,000 tonnes of residual waste is generated in greenhouse horticulture.
The facility was realised in part thanks to an investment from the Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations’ National Growth Fund Programme for a Future-Proof Living Environment (TBL) and the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Policy’s FTO investment programme for applied research facilities. To further scale up industrial, circular and bio-based supply chains within TBL, TNO is collaborating in the scaling-up chain ‘Biobased construction systems as a new industrial standard’, as well as with the National Approach to Biobased Construction (NABB) and the Innovation and Upscaling Programme for Housing Construction (IOP).
