For decades, Europe’s forests, fields, and coastlines have quietly produced an abundance of biomass that rarely reaches its full potential. Agricultural residues, underutilised plants, textile waste, and even marine biomass are often treated as low-value by-products despite containing one of nature’s most remarkable building blocks: cellulose.
As Europe accelerates its transition towards a circular bioeconomy, this overlooked biomass is becoming increasingly important. Rather than extracting new resources or relying on fossil-based materials, researchers are asking a different question: What if the materials we need already exist within the resources we currently waste?
Answering that question requires more than developing a single sustainable material. It requires building entirely new value chains capable of transforming diverse biomass streams into high-performance products while minimising waste, reducing chemical use, and keeping valuable resources in circulation for as long as possible.
This shared ambition brings together two European research initiatives: Bio-LUSH and CELLFIL.
Different Starting Points, Shared Vision
Although the two projects focus on different stages of the value chain, they are working towards the same objective: creating sustainable alternatives to today’s resource-intensive material systems.
Bio-LUSH focuses on the very beginning of that journey.
The project is developing a new fibre extraction process capable of recovering high-quality cellulose fibres from underexplored biomass resources, including hemp, nettle, forest residues, and seagrasses. Unlike conventional pulping technologies, Bio-LUSH aims to achieve this using significantly milder processing conditions and fewer harsh chemicals while enabling a much higher overall utilisation of each biomass resource.
Rather than viewing biomass as a source of a single product, Bio-LUSH applies a cascading valorisation approach where multiple valuable fractions are recovered, helping maximise both economic value and resource efficiency. By creating decentralised and scalable processing routes, the project seeks to unlock regional biomass resources that are currently difficult to utilise economically.
The result is not simply new fibres, but an entirely new way of thinking about biomass utilisation—one that supports local value creation while reducing environmental impacts.
Turning Sustainable Fibres into Sustainable Textiles
If Bio-LUSH focuses on producing better cellulose fibres, CELLFIL demonstrates how those fibres can become the next generation of circular textiles.
Funded through Horizon Europe, CELLFIL is developing advanced lyocell filament technologies that integrate renewable and circular feedstocks, including orange peel residues and cotton textile waste, into high-performance textile production.
The project optimises every stage of the textile manufacturing process—from filament production and yarn functionalisation to fabric development and end-use validation. Throughout the project, CELLFIL will demonstrate lyocell filament applications across sectors including performance clothing, automotive textiles, and technical textiles.
Beyond developing new materials, the project also investigates the practical conditions needed for industrial deployment. Through life-cycle assessments, techno-economic analysis, safety evaluations, and market studies, CELLFIL is building the evidence required to scale sustainable textile production across Europe.
At its core, the project addresses one of the textile industry’s greatest challenges: replacing fossil-based synthetic fibres with renewable, biodegradable alternatives that can perform at industrial scale.
