Bio-Based Construction Materials in the Context of the EU Bioeconomy: Overcoming Systemic Barriers to Mainstream Adoption

The construction sector must simultaneously meet rising global demand and cut embodied carbon deeply enough to satisfy European Green Deal and Bioeconomy Strategy targets—two pressures that conventional petrochemical-derived materials are poorly placed to resolve. Bio-based alternatives offer a credible path: they sequester carbon, carry lower embodied emissions, improve indoor air quality, and fit naturally within circular economy models. Yet they remain marginal in specification practice. This paper reviews the evidence on bio-based construction materials and maps the barriers that keep them there. The analysis organises these barriers into four levels—structural, economic, technical, and enabling—and traces the conditional relationships between them, with direct consequences for how policy interventions should be sequenced. The strategic case for this transition extends beyond environmental policy: the 2026 Strait of Hormuz disruption is used here as a scenario to show how dependent European construction is on fossil-derived material inputs, and how exposed that dependence leaves the sector to geopolitical supply shocks. The principal obstacles to adoption prove to be institutional and economic rather than technical—regulatory fragmentation, absent harmonised standards, fragile supply chains, and market structures that systematically undervalue bio-based solutions. The paper concludes that meaningful scaling requires coordinated action across governance, market design, and industrial policy, and that material and performance advances alone will not deliver it.