Opportunities come not just from turning trash into treasure, but from engineering systems and products to make that a regular reality.
— Jim Carroll
The opportunity
Leverage the natural growth of fungal networks to create biodegradable, renewable, and versatile alternatives to plastics, foams, and other conventional materials.
From “Decoding Tomorrow: 30 Megatrends - #8 The Circular Economy: “Opportunities come not just from turning trash into treasure, but from engineering systems and products to make that a regular reality.”” (July 2025)
Bioplastics Growth: The bioplastics market is projected to grow from $9.5 billion to $73.5 billion by 2033, with packaging representing the largest segment.
The construction and demolition sector is identified as a “$212.7 billion goldmine” for circularity. Recycled concrete aggregates alone could create $122 billion by 2050.
Increased adoption of sustainable building materials
From “Decoding Tomorrow: The Way Forward: #5 Construction: “For centuries, construction was about brute force. The next century will be about intelligence—smart materials, robotic precision, and data-driven design.”” (September 2025)
“For centuries, construction was about brute force. The next century will be about intelligence—smart materials, robotic precision, and data-driven design.” - Futurist Jim Carroll
Today, however, a powerful convergence of digital technology, advanced materials, and new methodologies is transforming every aspect of how we design, build, and manage the world’s buildings & infrastructure . Like most other industries, construction is moving from a project-based, physically-intensive model to a data-driven, technologically-advanced ecosystem.
Explore the circular economy: Make green building a core competitive advantage, not just a compliance issue. Actively explore and pilot the use of new, sustainable materials and adopt “design for deconstruction” principles to create long-term value.
From “The BIG Future: New Materials Science” (February 2023)
The list goes on. Essentially, this aspect of science affects virtually every industry - power and telecommunications, aerospace, construction, biomedical, energy, healthcare, automotive, and sustainable development. Even the acceleration of brain science - in that new materials might help lower the risk of infection for new probes that might be used in brain surgery and the acceleration of computer-to-brain technology (discussed in one of my other BIG Future trends - The Acceleration of Brain Science .) “These bioactive polymer- based electrodes can enable the conformal contact with irregular tissue and result in low inflammation when compared to conventional rigid inorganic electrodes. In this review, we focus on the use of silk fibroin and cellulose biopolymers as well as certain synthetic polymers to offer the desired flexibility for constructing electrode substrates for a conformal neural interface.
In a new review paper, a team of international researchers have laid out how engineers are taking inspiration from the biological world-and designing new kinds of materials that are potentially tougher, more versatile and more sustainable than what humans can make on their own.
The inclusion of living materials in human-built environments could offer significant benefits; however, today scientists and engineers are unable to easily control the size and shape of living materials in ways that would make them useful for construction. DARPA is launching the Engineered Living Materials (ELM) program with a goal of creating a new class of materials that combines the structural properties of traditional building materials with attributes of living systems. Living materials represent a new opportunity to leverage engineered biology to solve existing problems associated with the construction and maintenance of built environments, and to create new capabilities to craft smart infrastructure that dynamically responds to its surroundings.
Read the full pieces on jimcarroll.com:
Decoding Tomorrow: 30 Megatrends - #8 The Circular Economy: “Opportunities come not just from turning trash into treasure, but from engineering systems and products to make that a regular reality.”
Decoding Tomorrow: The Way Forward: #5 Construction: “For centuries, construction was about brute force. The next century will be about intelligence—smart materials, robotic precision, and data-driven design.”
The BIG Future: New Materials Science