Farmers, foresters and other producers of biological materials will coordinate with academics and Government to generate more value from new products such as chemicals and energy under a new national bioeconomy policy.

While keeping the focus on food production, the aim of the policy published by An Taoiseach Leo Varadkar is that plants, animals and waste also contribute to renewable energy.

“Bioprocessing and bio-refining can replace high embedded carbon products such as concrete, steel, plastics and chemicals with biobased alternatives,” the document reads.

Minister for Agriculture Michael Creed said such diversification was never more important due to Brexit.

This requires “pulling together all the relevant players beyond the agri-food and waste sectors” into an implementation group to ensure “policy coherence: there’s a lot of push and pull measures going on”, said Patrick Barrett of the Department of Agriculture’s research division at the composting and anaerobic digestion meeting last week.

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The Government wants to coordinate efforts to generate value-added products such as plastics and pharmaceuticals from agri food byproducts and waste.