Inside Plantics' EIC Accelerator Project on Bioresin Plant Pots

Plantics makes a thermoset resin from plant residues, a material class that has almost always come from oil. The European Commission selected the company, based in Arnhem in the Netherlands, in the 3 April 2019 cut-off of the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2, the Horizon 2020 pilot that preceded today's EIC Accelerator. The list names Plantics as the only beneficiary of the project. The grant, PlanticsInside, paid €1,997,186.98 towards a €3,023,722.15 project to coat moulded paper with the resin and sell it as a replacement for single-use plastic, starting with plant pots, according to CORDIS.

Seven years later the pots are on sale under the brand DOPA, but in 2025 they still came from what the company itself calls a pilot line. The money that has arrived since 2024, from Saint-Gobain, ICOS Capital and the Dutch state's Invest International, is aimed at a broader business: resin for wood panels, hemp composites, furniture and construction materials.

Where Plantics Stands Now

Plantics is active. On 21 April 2026 Queen Máxima toured Cleantech Park Arnhem and sat in a chair by the Dutch designer Joris Laarman made with Plantics resin, according to nieuws.nl and the newsletter of Process Design Center, a Plantics shareholder since 2017, which reports that chief executive Wridzer Bakker showed how farm residues become a resin that is pressed with hemp fibres into "products ranging from building panels to designer furniture". The holding company filed its balance sheet for 2025 on 29 June 2026, according to North Data.

The plant pot is still part of the business. A February 2026 profile in the flower trade magazine Thursd describes DOPA pots as paper reinforced with the resin, made on a demonstration plant producing about 6 million pots a year, and the company exhibited them at IPM Essen, the horticulture fair, in January 2025, according to the trade body AIPH. No grower or retailer customer is named in either source.

The Technology: A Thermoset From Plant Waste

Most plastics that can be called bio-based are thermoplastics, which melt when heated. Thermosets, such as the formaldehyde resins that glue chipboard and plywood or the polyurethane in insulation foam, set permanently when cured and are made almost entirely from fossil feedstock. Plantics' resin is a thermoset made from plant-based residue streams such as molasses and side products of biorefineries, according to a CORDIS results summary. The company says it is 100% bio-based, free of formaldehyde, recyclable and biodegradable if it ends up in the environment.

The resin was found by accident. Gadi Rothenberg, a professor of catalysis at the University of Amsterdam, and the chemist Albert Alberts were trying to make bio-kerosene when they produced "sticky goo", as IO+ reported in March 2021; the two founded Plantics in 2014, according to the university. The property the company stresses most is that cured resin can be reactivated and reused as a binder. Bakker called that "the 'holy grail' for the wood industry" in the CORDIS summary, and the gallery Friedman Benda writes that the curing is "reversible, through a technique they call only process X", so that Laarman's Ply Loop chair can be taken apart and its glue reused. No independent test of the reversibility or of the biodegradation claims could be found.

What PlanticsInside Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

The grant agreement was signed on 13 August 2019 and the project ran from 1 August 2019 to 31 July 2023. Plantics said it would "design, build, and demonstrate an optimized product and resin production process" so that a first product could reach the market quickly, followed by others, and that it would "finalize contracts with customers and suppliers", according to the project's final report on CORDIS. The first product chosen was a paper plant pot that is planted with the plant and breaks down in the soil.

The report is frank about what went wrong. Demand for moulded paper surged during the COVID-19 pandemic, suppliers were disrupted and greenhouses closed, and "the project timeline was extended". Because of shortages of recycled paper and moulded paper products in Europe, "the plant pots were temporarily purchased from China". Plantics nevertheless sold 300,000 pots in Germany. A pilot installation was commissioned in two stages and, by the final period, "is used for full-time production". But the report ends on the main gap: the tooling for a European supplier of the paper pots "persisted as a technical challenge, impeding large-scale production realization". Two development projects for food contact packaging with two potential partners were started; no product from them has been announced.

The sources disagree on the size of the line. The CORDIS Results in Brief of December 2023 put its capacity at "around 10 million pots a year"; the CORDIS follow-up of November 2025 and Thursd in 2026 say about 6 million. The 2025 follow-up adds that the curing oven now has a conveyor belt and the line an automated stacking station, and that an automated antifungal coating step is planned so the pots last longer for slow-growing crops.

1. Optimised resin for moulded paper, scaled synthesisDeliveredResin synthesis scaled "rapidly", per the final report; pots coated and sold.
2. Build and demonstrate a production processDeliveredPilot line in full-time production by 2023; about 6 million pots a year per CORDIS in 2025.
3. First product on the marketDelivered300,000 pots sold in Germany; DOPA brand shown at IPM Essen 2025.
4. European paper pot supply for large-scale productionNot achievedTooling still a "technical challenge" at project end; "still remains a pilot line" in 2025.
5. Further products, such as food contact packagingNot shownTwo development projects started; no product announced.
6. Customer and supplier contractsPartlyRepeat retail customers and a follow-up order reported; no customer named.

The verdict on the grant is therefore mixed. Plantics did what a development grant is meant to pay for: it built a working line and proved that its coated pots sell. It did not reach the industrial scale the project was meant to prepare, and the project needed an extension to get as far as it did. Project leader Geert Noordzij told CORDIS in 2023 that growers resisted anything that might raise their costs, so the company targeted retailers instead, and that the pots, which behave differently from inert plastic, required cultivation guidelines and visits to clients: "This wasn't expected, but the project resulted in us expanding out of our core business."

What Plantics Has Achieved Since the Award

The EIC grant was not Plantics' only EU money. From November 2019 to April 2023 it coordinated SWOP, a Horizon 2020 Fast Track to Innovation project with an EU contribution of €2,249,687, to make formaldehyde-free wood panels with its resin, with the Finnish plywood maker Koskisen, the Dutch kitchen maker Triboo and the Belgian wood research centre CTIB. Plantics Holding and Plantics B.V. received €1,146,330.16 of it between them. The final SWOP report says plywood can now be produced at Koskisen and that panels were used in kitchens, while "the last steps are being taken to get the product ready for market". No commercial launch of these panels by Koskisen could be found. In May 2021 Plantics and the furniture maker Vepa were among the three winners of the Renewable Material of the Year award for a hemp-fibre chair, according to Resource and the EU's Circular Economy Stakeholder Platform.

Private capital followed the end of the EU projects. In December 2024 Saint-Gobain took a minority equity stake to develop "circular construction materials" together, according to the University of Amsterdam and AIPH. In June 2025 ICOS Capital invested, with the regional development company Oost NL and Nationaal Groenfonds, according to ICOS Capital and aav.nl. In October 2025 the state-owned Invest International took a minority stake to scale production and the international roll-out, according to aav.nl, which reprints the announcement. None of the amounts has been disclosed. The EIC award was grant only, and Plantics does not appear in the EIC Fund's list of invested companies, nor in any of the investment announcements as an EIC Fund holding.

The Money

The filed balance sheets show the effect of the new shareholders. Plantics Holding B.V. went from negative equity of €733,146 at the end of 2022 to positive equity of €8,557,857 at the end of 2025, while its debts fell from €2,951,011 to €401,911, according to the Chamber of Commerce filings summarised by Liza. The operating company Plantics B.V. tells a different story: its equity was minus €2,328,751 at the end of 2025, after minus €262,615 a year earlier, with debts of €3,141,818. The two balance sheets are not consolidated, so the group's overall position cannot be read from them, and Dutch small-company filings do not show revenue or the annual result. These figures come from one aggregator and could not be checked against a second source.

North Data also lists Dutch state aid to Plantics under the Top Sector Energy scheme of €517,590 in September 2019 and €963,629 in March 2021, and €71,925 under a subsidised interest rate scheme in November 2020. It lists patent publications since 2021 on foams, panels, biodegradable containers and resin compositions. These entries were not cross-checked against a second source.

Why Europe Should Care

Plantics sits where two EU policies meet. The Commission's 2022 policy framework on biobased, biodegradable and compostable plastics says such plastics can bring advantages over conventional ones if they are designed for circularity and made from sustainably sourced feedstock, with priority for secondary biomass such as residues, which is what Plantics says it uses. And from 6 August 2026 the EU's REACH restriction on formaldehyde, Regulation (EU) 2023/1464, bars furniture and wood-based articles that release more than 0.062 mg of formaldehyde per cubic metre, as UL summarises. A formaldehyde-free binder made from European agricultural residues answers both, and reduces the dependence of the wood and construction industries on fossil chemicals.

The Verdict

Plantics has not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records, company statements and EU project data, linked throughout.