From the ‘3Fs’ to the Four Pillars: Exploring the Bioeconomy Through Food, Materials, Energy, and Health

In 2025, Australia became one of the first countries in the world to approve a cultivated meat product for sale – a cell-grown quail developed by Sydney startup (and CoLabs alumni) Vow. It was a milestone moment: proof that Australia can deliver world-leading bio-innovation, even without a national strategy in place.

But here’s the rub. More than 50 countries already have bioeconomy strategies. India aims to reach a $300 billion target by 2030. China has launched 20 pilot bio-industrial zones. The EU and US are investing billions in biomanufacturing capacity. Strategy unlocks follow-on investment, de-risks private capital, and aligns policy with innovation. Australia? We’re still flying without a compass.

That’s risky. Without direction, breakthroughs leak offshore. Startups scale elsewhere, jobs land elsewhere, and Australia ends up importing the very solutions we could have been exporting.

The opportunity is enormous – and urgent. A bioeconomy refers to utilising biology, rather than fossil fuels, as the primary engine of industry. It means food without factory farms, plastics without petrochemicals, fuels without oil wells, and health innovations that won’t cost the Earth. Done right, it’s a chance to regenerate ecosystems while building prosperity.

Traditionally, people have talked about the ‘three Fs’ of food, fibre, and fuel. However, the modern bioeconomy requires us to look through a wider lens. At CoLabs, we use the Four Pillars model – food, materials, energy, and health – as the foundation for this transformation. It’s a way to make sense of where biology is already reshaping industries, and how Australia can leapfrog into a circular, regenerative future.

Pillar 1: Food 

Australia loves its meat-and-three-veg identity, but the bioeconomy is already rewriting the menu. Instead of thinking only in terms of cows, sheep, and endless hectares of pasture, startups are showing us how proteins can be produced, cultivated, and fermented with a fraction of the land, water, and emissions.

Take Vow, a CoLabs alum that made headlines with the world’s first cultivated quail approved for sale in Australia in 2025. Or Magic Valley, which is promoting cultivated beef and lamb produced in bioreactors rather than paddocks. These aren’t sci-fi stunts–they’re prototypes of food systems that scale without gobbling up ecosystems.

Then there’s Eden Brew, working with reprogrammed yeast to make dairy proteins like casein and whey–no cows, no methane, just fermentation tanks and some very smart microbes. Same deal for egg proteins, collagen, or even coffee aromas: precision fermentation is turning yeasts into miniature chefs, whipping up the building blocks of everyday diets.

And food isn’t just about protein. Ferment Tasmania is quietly transforming the island into a living laboratory for fermentation-based innovation, nurturing everything from artisanal cheese to novel alternative proteins. It demonstrates how bioregional hubs can integrate local identity, global markets, and regenerative design.

The punchline? Feeding a growing population doesn’t have to mean more industrial feedlots or factory farms. In the bioeconomy, we get dinner that tastes familiar but comes with a radically different backstory: fewer emissions, less land, more resilience. Or to put it cheekily, why graze for years when you can ferment for days?

Pillar 2: Materials

Forget fast fashion and concrete jungles–materials are where the bioeconomy gets to flex its design chops. If food fills our stomachs, materials shape everything else: what we wear, build, wrap, and throw away. And let’s be honest, petrochemical plastics and leather from cattle aren’t exactly winning sustainability awards.

That’s why innovators are remixing biology into the material world. Alt. Leather is cooking up a plastic-free, waste-based leather alternative that feels luxe without the livestock. Great Wrap is taking potato waste and turning it into compostable stretch wrap–so your leftovers and logistics can both dodge petro-plastic guilt.

Then there’s ULUU, a WA startup culturing bacteria to produce PHA plastics–biodegradable polyesters that microbes have been quietly making for millions of years. ULUU goes one better by feeding its bacteria with seaweed, tying circular biomaterials to regenerative aquaculture. Plastic that breaks down in the ocean, made from ocean crops? That’s not greenwashing; that’s system design.

And don’t sleep on fungi. Fungi Solutions is growing packaging foams and exploring building products from mycelium, literally transforming waste into lightweight, compostable structures. The fashion world is also playing with mycelium leather and even jackets grown from textile waste. Meanwhile, Zeoform is transforming cellulose into carbon-negative composites for furniture and interiors, reimagining the built environment as part of the solution to sequestration, rather than the polluting problem.

Taken together, these startups show that materials don’t have to be extractive. They can be regenerative, circular, and beautiful. Imagine wardrobes where every garment composts back to soil, or buildings that double as carbon sinks. In the bioeconomy, our material culture stops being a burden and begins to become part of the planetary healing process.

Pillar 3: Energy 

Energy is the engine of civilisation. Without it, we’re back to candles, horse carts, and writing by quill – which sounds super romantic until you remember smallpox and no coffee machines. Right now, our ‘engine’ runs on fossil fuels, and that’s basically like fuelling your car with whiskey: fun in the short term, catastrophic in the long run.

Swapping out fossil fuels for bio-based energy isn’t just a ‘nice idea.’ It’s survival 101. If we don’t make this transition, civilisation’s end credits start rolling way earlier than we’d like. The good news? Bioenergy doesn’t mean one thing – it’s a whole menu. We’ve got traditional biofuels like ethanol and biodiesel, sure, but also advanced biorefineries that transform agricultural residues, algae, or even city waste into liquid fuels, electricity, or hydrogen.

Take algae: it’s the ultimate overachiever. Thrives in salty water, slurps up CO₂, and churns out oils, proteins, and even jet fuel precursors. Projects like Bondi Bio and Provectus Algae in Australia are proving that tiny green cells can punch above their weight in synthesising stuff from sunlight. 

Then there’s the vision of repurposed coal plants and other old industrial dinosaurs like paper mills and mines, swapping smokestacks for bioreactors and turning waste streams into clean power.

But let’s be real: unlocking sustainable, circular liquid fuels is on hell of a complex endeavour. Green chemistry pathways, large-scale biogas systems, and marine-degradable biofuels are only just beginning to be explored. And not every path is a silver bullet – some raise complex trade-offs around land use, energy inputs, or biodiversity. That’s why nuance matters here: getting energy right is as much about systems design as it is about microbes in a tank.

The promise? A future where organic waste from farms, forests, and cities isn’t ‘trash’ but feedstock for powering planes, ships, and maybe even my Friday night DJ sessions. Done well, bioenergy closes loops, builds resilience, and keeps the lights on without turning the planet into Dante’s inferno.

Pillar 4: Health 

Biomanufacturing doesn’t stop at food or materials – it’s also rewriting the rules of healthcare. What once looked like sorcery (cells making medicines in tanks) is now just Tuesday in the lab. Living cells and microbes are producing vaccines, biologic medicines, diagnostics, and next-gen therapies under conditions far gentler (and cleaner) than petrochemical, high-heat processes.

Australia is stepping up here. The SMART CRC ($238M) is turbocharging regenerative medicine, bioprocessing, and biomaterials. Cartherics is running a GMP-grade cleanroom for off-the-shelf immune cell therapies. Add startups like Elita, OncoRevive, OncoParse, and Diag-Nose.io from the CoLabs orbit, and you’ve got a pipeline that spans from cutting-edge diagnostics to cell therapies.

Here’s the kicker: every cleanroom, every bioreactor, every run of sterile fermentation creates spillover benefits. The same talent and infrastructure powering health biomanufacturing – fermentation engineers, sterile ops experts, regulatory wizards – are the exact skills needed to scale food, materials, and energy biomanufacturing. In other words, in Australia, health is the bioeconomy’s on-ramp.

Adding the circular bioeconomy lens makes the story even more seductive. Think bacterial cellulose dressings, bio-based polymers for implants, or mycelium/algae components replacing single-use plastics in medtech. Green chemistry, enzyme-driven steps, and closed-loop water/energy systems shrink footprints while maintaining GMP standards. Even waste streams (spent media, biomass, plastics) are being reimagined as inputs for new materials.

Why does this matter? Because sovereign health biomanufacturing isn’t just about saving lives – it’s about resilience. It enables us to develop our own vaccines, therapies, and diagnostics while building the skills and systems that ripple across the four pillars. Health is both a pillar and a multiplier: it anchors national security, fosters high-value jobs, and accelerates the development of the circular bioeconomy.

The Soil Beneath the Pillars

You might be thinking, but what about farming? Surely this belongs in the bioeconomy. Well, yes and no. Conventional monocropped industrial agriculture? Probably not. Regenerative Farming Practices like Agroecology, Polyculture farming, food forests, and syntropic agriculture? Absolutely. And no, these approaches aren’t in competition with high-tech; instead, they are in deep collaboration with it. They provide the living operating substrate on which the bioeconomy relies. By stacking species and successional layers, these practices rebuild soils, hold water, buffer heat, and lift total yields per hectare – while generating clean feedstocks for the other pillars: fibres and resins for Materials, manures and crop residues for Energy (biogas, bio-refining), and phytonutrient-rich crops that spill into Health (functional foods, bioactive compounds). In short, ecological design through agriculture is bioprocess design – just on a different scale. 

From Pillars to Planetary Flourishing

Food, materials, energy, and health aren’t just four disconnected silos – they’re the pillars of a single living architecture. Each one reveals a facet of the bioeconomy’s promise: feeding people without frying the planet, swapping out petro-plastics for biodegradable alternatives, powering our lives with biology’s chemistry instead of fossil fuels, and building a health system where cell factories save lives and spill their know-how across industries.

Zoom in, and you see microbes  (bacteria, yeast, algae, fungi) tirelessly at work, turning waste into value, proteins into meals, and sugars into materials. Zoom out, and you find bioregions with their own strengths – kelp coasts, forestry heartlands, fermentation hubs – weaving into a distributed network of enabling innovation infrastructure. Pull further back still, and you see socio-ecological systems: humans, cultures, and ecosystems co-evolving in adaptive cycles, resilient because of their diversity, feedback, and reciprocity.

This fractal pattern is the real story. The bioeconomy is not just about replacing one input with another – it’s about re-patterning the operating system of industry itself so that it behaves more like life: circular, adaptive, regenerative. It’s about weaving disciplines together – synthetic biology with permaculture, biomimicry with Indigenous knowledge, venture studios with commons-based governance – into a practice of planetary stewardship.

Australia stands at a threshold. Will we remain a resource quarry for someone else’s bioeconomy, or will we grow our own distributed, bioregional innovation system, grounded in Country and geared toward global leadership? The choice isn’t abstract. The infrastructure, the talent, and the momentum are here – what’s missing is a coherent strategy and the courage to scale.

If we get this right, the four pillars become more than just sectors; they become a unified whole. They become the scaffolding of a third industrial revolution – one that doesn’t just build prosperity, but regenerates the foundations of life itself.

Designing Across Scales

The bioeconomy isn’t just one story; it’s many – stacked, nested, and entangled. To design it well, we need to zoom in and out: from microbes in tanks, to macro-organisms in forests and farms, to human-made systems, and finally to the socio-ecological webs that hold it all together. Each level is a thread, and resilience comes from weaving them tightly.

Micro: Life’s Tiny Engineers

Microbes are the primordial biotechnologists, Nature’s original inventors, shaped and sharpened by billions of years of evolutionary trial and error. Today, we harness their chemistry to brew proteins, grow packaging, or turn seaweed sugars into compostable plastics. New Era Bio is using precision fermentation to produce biodegradable natural dyes — vibrant, high-performance colours that are engineered to integrate into existing textile supply chains. Their process limits the use of arable land, reduces water pollution, and produces fully biodegradable pigments. Each fermentation tank reminds us that biology works with life’s universal building blocks — sugars, proteins, fats, minerals — endlessly reconfigured into regenerative forms.

Meso: Designing with Life

Zooming out, design practices such as biodesign, biomimicry, permaculture, polyculture, and syntropic agriculture enable us to collaborate with living systems rather than dominate them. Biodesign literally grows products with organisms: think mycelium packaging or algae-based plastics like the work of Other Matter. Biomimicry draws inspiration from nature’s blueprints and ethics, designing systems that run on sunlight, cycle everything, and as Janine Benyus so eloquently put it, create conditions conducive to life. Permaculture roots these ideas in practice, guided by the ethics of Earth care, people care, and fair share, showing how farms, enterprises, or even communities can mimic the resilience of ecosystems. Whether at the level of a field or a building, the same logics apply: closed loops, reciprocity, diversity.

Macro: Socio-Ecological Systems in Place

At the regional and national scale, living systems thinking reminds us to see the forest and the roots, fungi, water, and pollinators that sustain it. This is where bioregional planning comes in: mapping flows of biomass, energy, and knowledge to design hubs of bio-innovation. In Victoria, CoLabs has collaborated with University of Melbourne students to map circular economy opportunities in the Gippsland volcanic plains. Meanwhile, in the Yarra Ranges, conversations with Sam Rye and the Council are exploring how regional bio-innovation hubs could emerge. Here, Indigenous knowledges are not an ‘add-on’ but a foundation. Two-Eyed Seeing – weaving Western science with First Nations ways of knowing – ensures innovation respects Country through protocols, reciprocity, and re-storying place.

Meta: Panarchy and Planetary Boundaries

At the slowest, broadest scales, global currents encompass finance, geopolitics, climate agreements, and planetary boundaries. Panarchy theory shows how resilience emerges when fast-moving local experiments (like startups) connect with slower-moving governance, national strategies, and global flows of capital and knowledge. More than 50 countries with national bioeconomy strategies have proven that systemic policy creates follow-on investment, infrastructure, and sovereign capacity. Australia risks being left behind unless it adopts a whole-systems view, where economies are embedded in ecosystems and industries are designed as part of life’s cycles of growth, release, and renewal.

Innovation Ecosystems & Hubs

The bioeconomy won’t flourish if it’s all jammed into one shiny tower in Sydney or Melbourne. Life doesn’t work that way – ecosystems thrive through diversity, distributed niches, and interconnection. If we want a truly resilient circular bioeconomy, we need to think in hubs and bioregions, not just head offices and capital cities.

Distributed by Design

Australia’s edge lies in its landscapes and local genius. Each bioregion can host its own flavour of bio-innovation:

• Ferment Tasmania: This newly opened site could position Tasmania as a national leader in fermentation-based food and drink, blending artisanal culture with biotechnology to create a vibrant regional identity.
• Western Australia: Instead of just digging deeper holes, WA could leverage its engineering expertise and abundant sun to drive bioremediation and bioenergy – cleaning up old scars while generating new prosperity.
• Gippsland Volcanic Plains: where students and researchers are mapping circular economy opportunities, from agricultural residues to distributed biorefineries.
• Upper Yarra Ranges: Early explorations with Yarra Ranges Council and individuals like Sam Rye to envision bioregional innovation hubs that combine community resilience with ecological stewardship.

Reusing Old Infrastructure

Coal power plants, paper mills, and mining sites don’t need to be left as stranded assets or environmental wounds. They can be repurposed into fermentation plants, algae farms, or modular biorefineries. This isn’t just the efficient reuse of sunk costs – it’s a way of honouring place and people, giving old industries a redemptive second chance at life. In doing so, we begin to address the karmic load of extraction – acknowledging the harm while re-storying sites of depletion as sites of renewal. Paper mills, coal plants, and mine sites don’t need to be scars on the landscape; they can become anchors for biorefineries, algae farms, and hubs of circular innovation. In this way, infrastructure is not abandoned but transformed – serving regeneration rather than extraction, and helping heal both ecosystems and economies.

Why It Matters

Distributed hubs make the system resilient. If one node fails, others continue to operate. They also build local value chains, keeping jobs, knowledge, and stewardship rooted in place. Seen through a socio-ecological lens, hubs align human innovation with the logic of ecosystems: diversity, feedback, and reciprocity.

Grounding in Country

For this to work, each hub must be culturally grounded. That means embedding Indigenous protocols and knowledge: listening to Country, honouring custodianship, and designing in ways that are reciprocal, not extractive. Two-Eyed Seeing reminds us to weave together Western biotech with First Nations wisdom – science and story, data and ceremony – so that hubs regenerate both land and culture. This directly operationalises Priority 3 of the National Science and Research Priorities: Elevating Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledge systems.

In short, the bioeconomy will not be built in boardrooms alone. It will be composted, brewed, and co-created in labs, farms, and communities across the continent, spanning all scales, forming a dynamic, living network.

Wrapping it all up

If the ‘3Fs’ gave us language for an earlier era, the Four Pillars – Food, Materials, Energy, Health – give us a blueprint for the one we must build next. Zoom in, and you’ll find microbes quietly rewriting the manufacturing process. Zoom out and you’ll see bioregions ready to host circular value chains, hubs repurposing yesterday’s infrastructure, and a nation that can move from extraction to reciprocity. Thread it all together with Panarchy’s cross-scale dynamics and Two-Eyed Seeing, and a different Australia comes into focus: resilient because it’s distributed, prosperous because it’s regenerative, innovative because it learns with Country, not over it.

But blueprints don’t pour concrete. More than 50 nations already use bioeconomy strategies to unlock follow-on investment and align policy with practice. Australia has the talent, biodiversity, and science; what’s missing is a coordinated strategy, more enabling infrastructure, and challenge-led innovation, as well as systemically attuned capital and financing facilities.

This is the work that inspired us to found CoLabs. We operate as the connective tissue – starting with labs, community and convenings – so founders, researchers and builders can move faster together. Next, we’re actively exploring what a steward-ownedventure studio, paired with bioregional learning centres and innovation hubs, could look like. If you’re ready to help grow a circular bioeconomy that doesn’t just ‘do less harm’ but amplifies life.

Sound awesome? Subscribe to our newsletter for updates, visit our facilities in Brunswick or Notting Hill, or explore partnering with us to co-create a regional hub. The window is open; let’s step through it boldly, and with an ever-widening circumference of curiosity and care.

Stay tuned; over the coming few months, we’ll be creating a series of bioeconomy articles that take a deeper dive into systems innovation for bio-led design and innovation. Things are only going to get juicier.