The BioBased Materials Collective (BBMC) is a growing community of over 1,500 members accelerating the transition to a climate positive and regenerative built environment across its supply chain and life cycles. We represent cultivators, harvesters, processors, manufacturers, architects, builders, developers, academics, policy makers and more. In collaboration with local and international groups we are united to rapidly scale regional plant-based materials across North America and the world, recognizing that the metacrisis demands bold, regenerative action and creative, synergistic, and cross-sectoral solutions.

Vision 2030

By 2030; we have established strong connections between regenerative agro-ecologies and building industries in support of bio-regional health, abundance, and wellbeing.

Across Turtle Island, foundational structures for bioregional, circular economies demonstrate how bio-based building materials undo harmful systems of practice, and reinforce regenerative land care, cooperative economic systems, and collective liberation.

Mission

BBMC exists to make healthy and climate positive bio-based materials the standard in buildings, alongside the creation of regenerative and just bio-regional cultures, economies, and ecologies.

Principles

1) Relationship to the Earth
Bio-based construction recognizes itself as an extension of the ecosystem.

• Regenerative Land Care:  biocultural relationships that promote biodiversity, provide net carbon sequestration, build healthy soils, and regenerate watersheds. 
• Material Health: Eliminating toxic chemicals from supply chains and prioritising healthy building materials that are safe for makers, inhabitants, and workers.
• Interspecies Respect: Honoring the “more-than-human” members of our communities, plants, fungi, animals, and minerals, as active participants in the construction ecosystem.

2) Relationship to Each Other

Bio-based construction is a tool for collective liberation by transforming the social structures that govern our lives.

• Undoing Supremacy: Centering the active dismantling of supremacy and extractive power dynamics between people in every stage of our work.
• Restorative Governance: Revitalising the biocultural practices and indigenous governance systems that support cultural diversity and historical wisdom.
• Transformative Resilience: Building the capacity of communities to not only survive environmental and social perturbations but to transform the larger systems causing harm by addressing the drivers of the metacrisis and structural violence at their root.

3) Relationship to the Economy

Bio-based construction replaces extractive economic models with equitable, regional systems that build collective wealth.

• Circularity: Eliminating the concept of waste by linking technical and economic processes in unbroken chains of value creation.
• Cooperative Ownership: Building systems based on equitable ownership, revenue transparency, and profit-sharing agreements that prevent wealth from being siphoned out of the community.
• Regional Wealth Retention: Ensuring that the economic value generated by bio-based practices remains with the communities practicing them, rather than being extracted by external interests.

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