Finnish webinars about new bio-based materials, their possibilities and challenges
What kind of new bio-based innovations are there already in the markets or are soon to be? What is the potential of bio-based products and materials? And what possibilities or challenges do they have in solving global problems? These were discussed in the New bio-based materials – possibilities and challenges –webinars organized by JAMK University of Applied Sciences.
When talking about bioeconomy, people often want to hear about real examples of the new applications and innovations from the field. And what would be even better, they’d like to see and touch these materials and products themselves, if possible, to really get an idea of what bio-based products can be like and how do they relate to people’s daily lives. This work JAMK has done with local students within the BLOOM project when organizing sessions for high school and university students to explore bio-based products and materials. This time though, we wanted to discuss about this topical issue with the wider public. Therefore, in 10th of March 2020, JAMK joined forces with the local Adult education centre to bring out the issue available for the wider public. The open lecture was recorded and it is available in Finnish in the Bioeconomy campus YouTube-channel.
In Finland, Adult education centres are organizations that not only offer education and courses from a large variety of subjects but also offer free and open lectures from different topics. They send magazines locally to every household twice a year to inform public about their open courses and lectures.
In addition to the Adult education centre lecture, BLOOM co-organized a webinar with the JAMK Bioeconomy Institute for the university’s agrology students in 27th of March to discuss about the topics from the “New bio-based materials – possibilities and challenges” video. The participants got the task to watch the video beforehand and the issues that rose to their minds from the video were discussed in the webinar with the lead of a BLOOM member from the Nordic hub.
Focusing on circularity and resource wisdom
When presenting samples about bio-based products and materials, people are often most interested to hear and discuss more about the concrete products and their characteristics – how are they produced, how does their features compete with the original materials and what are the pros and cons of the new materials from the end-user’s point of view. This was the case also when organizing the lecture and webinar in the Adult education centre. People really want to have concrete information about the products. With the university students though, we wanted to rise up more discussion about the problematics of bio-based products; should everything be replaced with bio-based materials and is there even enough raw materials for that? Is turning into bio-based answer for everything or should we also consider changing our way of consuming and doing things?
It’s about thinking the production and consumption not only from the bioeconomy point of view but also from the circular economy point of view – it’s about circular bioeconomy and resource wisdom that we want to encourage people to think and discuss about.
Watch the seminar
Want to hear more about the new innovations and problematics of bio-based materials? Watch the video from the Bioeconomy Campus YouTube-channel here. The video is only in Finnish. The video is suitable for example in educational purposes or anyone interested about the subject.
Written by Aino Voutilainen from JAMK University of Applied Sciences
