How Industries and Cities Are Seizing the Opportunity of the Bioeconomy to Enable Prosperous and Sustainable Regions: Cases from Quebec

Quebec, a province in Canada, is well positioned in the global bioeconomy. Its regions are overflowing with forest, agricultural crops or other organic residues that can be recovered and converted into bioproducts and bioenergy. Quebec's strength has long been in the forest products industry and municipal solid waste recycling. Product diversification is now targeted by many companies and municipalities. Value chains for bioproducts and bioenergy are set in practically all of Quebec's regions. In fact, most of them have their own “community-scale” bioeconomy project, even if the province of Quebec itself does not have yet its own bioproducts or bioeconomy roadmap. In this paper, various community-scale bioeconomy projects are presented and discussed. The role of cities and other local stakeholders in the deployment of these projects and the focus on getting products or coproducts for local uses are also elaborated. A framework involving the positive involvement of national and regional institutions and the development of a network with local stakeholders is proposed to increase the chance of success of community-scale bioeconomy projects.