Ellen MacArthur Foundation calls for circular policy on bio-based materials

The Ellen MacArthur Foundation pushed bio-based materials into a policy fight on 10 June 2026, and the message is blunt: plant-based inputs are not automatically circular if fashion keeps running them through the same take-make-waste machine. Its report, Circular by nature: a policy agenda for bio-based materials in a circular economy, argues that better design, infrastructure and market rules have to be built around these materials if they are going to create value without simply swapping one finite input for another.

The paper was prepared as an independent contribution to discussions of the Circular Economy Coalition for Latin America and the Caribbean, and it sits inside the Foundation’s wider effort to unlock a circular economy for natural systems through targeted research, reports and cross-sector collaboration. The coalition launched its shared vision on 24 February 2022, and this new agenda reads like a sharper, more practical next step: turn bio-based policy from a materials story into a systems story.

That systems view matters because the Foundation reviewed 13 national circular-economy policy strategies and found a common blind spot. Bio-based materials such as paper, natural fibres, biochemicals and timber are usually framed as substitutes for finite materials, not as materials with their own circularity problems and opportunities. An appendix says the analysis also examined 18 bio-based materials policy frameworks, using the Foundation’s Universal Circular Economy Policy Goals, first developed in 2021, as the benchmark.

In fashion, the argument lands harder than in almost any other category. The Foundation has long said today’s fashion industry is linear and should be circular, and it says every second the equivalent of a rubbish truckload of clothes is burnt or buried in landfill. That is the ugly backdrop for natural fibres, cotton, leather, rubber and timber-based materials moving through apparel and textiles, where circular design and end-of-life systems are still uneven.

The report’s real value is that it refuses the easy bio-based fantasy. Better policy alignment between circular-economy rules and bio-based-materials rules, it says, could unlock socioeconomic and environmental gains, from new revenue streams and innovation to stronger supply-chain resilience. For Latin America and the Caribbean, that means treating bio-based sectors as economic infrastructure, not just greener raw material, and building the rules that let them stay valuable after the first sale.