November 14, 2024

Imagine taking a broken pair of sneakers or used yoga pants back to the brand that made them, knowing that the polyester material they’re made from can be biologically broken down into its basic elements. , then used to create a shiny new pair of sneakers. or yoga pants or anything, really, made from polyester. Which is, in fact, many things.

This is the future a biotech startup called Carbios and a group of well-known sportswear brands are working towards. The French startup, which has developed an enzymatic process to destroy polyethylene terephthalate (commonly known as PET), recently signed an agreement with On, Patagonia, Puma and Salomon aimed at accelerating the commercialization of bio-recycling its technology for textiles.

The consortium aims to develop the industry’s first large-scale fiber-to-fiber polyester recycling system, a process that could play a significant role in the circularity of fashion.

Brands “can use plastics to make fibers, but they don’t have a solution for fiber-to-fiber recycling at scale,” Emmanuel Ladent, Carbios CEO, said in an interview.

At the same time, Carbios has partnered with PET manufacturer Indorama Ventures to build and operate the world’s first commercial-scale bio-recycling plant for PET-based plastic in Lunéville, a commune (or town) in Meurthe et Moselle that region of France. The company expects the facility, which will recycle local plastic waste, to begin operations in 2025.

PET is a polymer derived from oil that is mainly used to produce three products: plastic bottles: carpet; and clothing. The clothing industry refers to PET as polyester, a pet name for pet fabric that has become the most commonly used fiber in the world, comprising more than 50 percent of the fibers produced worldwide.

In the United States alone, over 34 billion pounds of clothing waste is generated each year, most of which ends up in the landfill.

Often mixed with other fabrics, such as cotton, and often accompanied by fixtures such as buttons, zippers and tags, polyester can be found in all types of clothing, sportswear and footwear. This complexity of design makes our clothes and shoes very difficult to recycle using conventional technologies. Many clothing and footwear brands use “recycled polyester” to some degree – in products often marketed as containing “ocean” or “ocean rope” plastic – but this material comes from conventionally -recycle plastic bottles, not used clothes.

While this practice reduces the amount of single-use plastics that burn, end up in landfills or in oceans and other waterways, recycled polyester from plastic bottles does not address its own huge problem. of post-consumer waste. In the United States alone, over 34 billion pounds of clothing waste is generated each year, most of which ends up in the trash.

A ‘true circular’ solution

Carbios uses one of the few microbes, discovered by various scientists, that develop flavor in PET. The company’s enzyme was first identified in compost, and modified by its own scientists to work faster and work at high temperatures where PET is softer.

Carbios says that its enzyme is also capable of selectively decomposing polyester material, making it possible to recover all the polyester found in textile waste, even mixed fabrics. And unlike conventional recycling, which degrades the quality of PET, which limits the number of times it can be recycled, as well as the amount that can be used in any product, enzymatic recycling destroys PET at the molecular level, so it is possible to recreate a virgin quality material that can be recycled over and over again, making the process, in theory though, truly circular.

“In the traditional world of recycling, solutions are not circular. You can recycle materials one, two, three times, and then it’s over. With our technology, it’s almost infinite,” said Ladent, who joined Carbios last year, replaces co-founder and CEO Jean-Claude Lumaret, who has led the company since it was founded in 2011.

French sports equipment manufacturer Salomon, whose use of recycled polyester currently stands at 38 percent, believes that the collaboration with Carbios will allow it to produce 100 percent recycled polyester products, according to Olivier Mouzin, footwear sustainability manager of the company. “We thought we could make recycled polyester with the same mechanical properties as a virgin one, which is not the case now,” he said.

Under the terms of the two-year agreement, the brands will collect post-consumer garments with polyester, as well as work on developing sorting and breaking technologies. In return, Carbios will provide them with bio-recycled polyester made from those garments.

Mouzin believes it will take several years to reach the point where Salomon can actually develop a product using Carbios technology. The best case scenario would be a small pilot project starting in 2026 or 2027.

Hungry, hungry enzymes

Scientists have been studying plastic-degrading enzymes for several decades.

In the mid-2010s, many of these enzymes were known, but in 2016 an important discovery was made. Researchers led by microbiologist Kohei Oda of Japan’s Kyoto Institute of Technology found a bacterium called Ideonella sakaiensis 201-F6, outside a bottle recycling facility, that not only breaks down and metabolizes PET, can also use plastic as its base. source of nutrients.

The key to this ability is a pair of unique enzymes produced by bacteria. The first (PETase) breaks down long PET molecules into smaller molecules, and the second (MHETase) then produces ethylene glycol and terephthalic acid, the chemical building blocks of PET. So Ideonella sakaiensis 201-F6 can completely reverse the manufacturing process that produces PET.

In the traditional world of recycling, solutions are not circular. You can recycle materials one, two, three times, and then it’s done. With our technology, it is almost infinite.

This discovery stimulated research into enzymatic recycling and led to further development. While studying the Ideonella sakaiensis PETase enzyme, researchers from the University of Portsmouth in the UK and the US Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) created a three-dimensional structure of the PETase enzyme that they tweaked to help they better understand how. it works. In doing so, they inadvertently engineered the enzyme, making it more efficient at degrading PET.

This research was led by John McGeehan, director of the University’s Center for Enzyme Innovation, and Gregg Beckham, a senior research fellow and team leader at NREL.

Later in 2020, McGeehan’s team reported that it had linked the PETase and MHETase enzymes. This “super-enzyme” can eat PET about six times faster than two enzymes working separately. Some research groups produce their own enzymes, such as Carbios, whose process was confirmed on the cover of the scientific journal Nature in the same year.

The scientists used the syringe in the Carbios lab

Carbios scientists studied different enzymes, including Ideonella sakaiensis PETase, but found that leaf-branch compost cutinase (LCC) outperformed the other enzymes they tested. With the changes made by Carbios scientists, which allow the enzyme to work faster and work at high temperatures, it remains the state of the art in the literature, Beckham said in an interview.

“To my knowledge, it remains the best enzyme or at least among the best enzymes reported,” he said. However, Carbios faces a couple of significant challenges, namely energy intensity and cost.

The Carbios process requires heat treatment and low-temperature grinding of PET waste — the polyester shirt or plastic bottle — before it is placed in a bioreactor with enzymes. And the processes of heating and grinding PET are energy intensive, Beckham said. “There are innovations needed to reduce the energy intensity of enzymatic PET recycling,” he said. “The dream is that you can take a piece of waste cloth or plastic bottles and just throw them into the enzymatic reactor and go. I have no idea when or even if we’ll get there, but that would be super cool. “

Then there’s the cost, which Mouzin acknowledges as a challenge. “But we have to check it in Carbios. We have to do that if we want to preserve the planet,” he said.

Because of the overwhelming interest in this concept from industry, enzymatic recycling has the potential to scale up relatively quickly, said Beckham, who is also the CEO of the BOTTLE Consortium, a research initiative funded by the US Department of Energy (DOE). which was launched in 2020 to help drive the commercialization of various new technologies (including but not limited to enzymatic recycling) to address the problem of plastic waste.

BOTTLE, which stands for “Bio-Optimized Technologies to keep Thermoplastics out of Landfills and the Environment,” is made up of five DOE national laboratories and five universities, four in the US and McGeehan’s team in the UK The consortium works with industry partners . , including Amazon, Patagonia, Ocean Foundation, Kraft and Heinz, in its efforts to accelerate these technologies.

The University of Portsmouth has also set up Revolution Plastics, which aims to create links between academia and industry and has a joint Ph.D. project with Coca-Cola.

In terms of commercialization of enzymatic plastic recycling, Carbios is the furthest. The startup has grown over the years, mostly through partnerships with large companies. In 2017, Carbios and L’Oréal (French) established a consortium to help industrialize the bio-recycling process for plastic packaging, leading to the creation of food-grade, proof-of-concept bottles with consortium partners PepsiCo, Nestlé Water and Suntory Beverage and Food.

Then in September 2021, Carbios opened a demonstration plant in Clermont-Ferrand, France, where it tested its system for bio-plastic recycling. This led to a partnership with Indorama Ventures, one of the largest PET manufacturers with 22 percent of the market, to build and operate a commercial-scale plant. The estimated $206 million facility has the capacity to process approximately 50,000 tons of PET waste annually, or the equivalent of 2 billion bottles. Carbios also expects the plant to create approximately 150 direct and indirect full-time jobs.

And there is more to come, said Ladent.

“Next year we plan to start licensing our technology, and I hope that soon we will have a license in the US,” he said. “We want to start production in the US in 2026 or around that time frame.”

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