Why Sustainability Matters in Bio-Based Ingredients: Practical Challenges, Key Decisions, and What’s Next

Event description

Sustainability is rapidly becoming a defining priority in industrial biotechnology influencing investment, regulation, consumer expectations, and the long-term viability of bioprocesses. As the industry shifts toward more responsible innovation, teams are increasingly expected to understand and quantify the environmental impact of their decisions from the earliest stages of development.

In this webinar, we will explore:

• Why sustainability matters now — environmental pressures, regulatory momentum, consumer expectations, and costly R&D decisions
• How sustainability is being implemented today — research advances, emerging assessment methods, localised sourcing, and process optimisation
• The current challenges in quantifying environmental impact — data limitations, inconsistent frameworks, and barriers to adoption in bioprocessing
• What’s next for the industry — tools enabling faster, more accessible environmental insights (including platforms like Foresight), cross-industry collaboration, sustainable protein research, and growing efforts toward standardisation.

GFI speaker

Lucas Eastham

LEAD SCIENTIST, FERMENTATION
THE GOOD FOOD INSTITUTE

Lucas works with the SciTech team to analyze the technical landscape for proteins and ingredients derived from microbial fermentation, identify key challenges, and articulate solutions to accelerate the industry. Before GFI, Lucas spent ten years at Algenol Biotech commercializing microbial-derived biofuels, biofertilizers, food ingredients, and cosmetic ingredients. His expertise ranges across the bioprocess commercialization spectrum from strain development, cultivation process development (USP), downstream process development (DSP), commercialization, and GMP operations. Lucas holds a B.S. in Biology and Anthropology from the University of Pittsburgh and an M.S. in Environmental Science and Management from Duquesne University.