Bioeconomy emerges under major current global challenges, both environmental and economic, that are related to the existence and use of bio-based resources; in this context, policy stakeholders and scientists seek and propose potential solutions. Bioeconomy is among the discussed strategies with the potential to offer solutions. In this framework, bioeconomy’s importance increased over the last several years, thus it is essential to identify and monitor its role and significance in an economy and assess its potentials and intersectoral relationships. In this framework, the current study, through a general equilibrium analysis, aims to identify the sectors that are related to the bioeconomy and assess their potential in the Polish economy as such quantitative studies do not exist in the literature for Poland. For doing so, an Input-Output model was built, identifying initially the bioeconomy sectors and, afterwards, estimating their linkage coefficients in order to capture their direct and indirect impacts on the Polish economy. Results indicate that the fully bio-based sectors, such as the agriculture and food sectors, have higher potentials to induce knock-on effects in the economy than the mixed bio-based sectors. Thus, the current study’s results can offer important information to policy makers for decision making, such as in the case of planning development in any mixed bio-based sectors, such as biofuels or biogas.

The support of economic sectors that exploit natural bio-based resources in a particular region is an opportunity to benefit from local potentials in terms of sustainability, employment, output, and household income. Hence a relevant question emerges, namely, how can bioeconomy sectors be adequately supported? Within this context, another issue is whether the bioeconomy development strategy at a national level should be the same as that at a regional level. To address these issues, in the current study a comparison was made between the bioeconomy sectors at the country level based on the case study of Poland and one of the poorest regions in the European Union—the Lubelskie Region. A regional input–output model was built for the regional economy and compared with the national model. The bioeconomy-oriented regional input–output table was built by applying a hybrid regionalization method, combining non-survey techniques and a questionnaire survey that was carried out in companies of mixed bio-based sectors. Sectoral linkages, such as multipliers and elasticities, indicate notable differences among the bio-based sectors’ potentials of the regional and national economies. Therefore, a bioeconomy development strategy should be seen to differ at national and regional levels.

Given the current geopolitical situation, as well as ongoing climate change, immediate action is imperative to develop sustainable energy production capacities and circular bioeconomy chains. The biogas sector, including 3rd generation biogas plants, can respond to intensive development pace ensuring sustainable energy production with lower carbon footprint. This is true for Poland, which has a highly developed agricultural and food production sector but a limited number of biogas plants and no biomethane production facilities. In this study, our objective is to support evidence-based policy advice by providing spatial analysis of bio-waste production potential in Poland. For this purpose, data was extracted from the so-called Waste Database (Polish: Baza Danych o Odpadach - BDO) and presented on district (powiat) level. Spatial and Geographical Information System (GIS) was applied to allocate waste resource potential for Poland related to national and regional development of biogas sector in the country. Thus the functioning of a system for the registration of waste data, including bio-waste from processing, is an outcome to demonstrate available resource availability per each manufacturing sector. Results indicate that Poland does have a quantitative and qualitative bio-waste potential for biogas production. Most of the bio-waste is not treated in the districts where it is generated. Having knowledge of the geographical distribution of the feedstock supply and demand, together with the use of other substrates, we can provide valuable information for the development of the biogas sector at regional and national level.