Since 2019, French firm Carbios has emerged as the world-leader on bio-recycling – a technique that could help us re-use plastics for longer.
Carbios’ enzyme-based method can upcycle plastic more times than conventional methods can, which can help limit demand for virgin materials.
Carbios is still building out industrial capacity. Yet its bio-recycling route has already shown clear technical advantages that make it potentially disruptive in textiles and packaging.
The importance of the IP is underlined by more recent disputes surrounding the company’s decision to open a plant in China.
We find out how Carbios got to become the world’s first bio-recycling scaler and why the tech is so important for industry.
A new kind of recycling
Thermo-mechanical recycling is one of the most common recycling methods today. It’s a simple method that shreds, melts, and remoulds plastic waste into new products.
Yet this method has its limits. Every time plastic is recycled, its quality degrades. Ultimately, plastic can only be subjected to mechanical recycling three or four times before it becomes unusable
Chemical techniques are another common recycling route that can maintain the quality of plastic for longer. However, it’s more cost-intensive than either mechanical approaches or buying virgin plastic.
Both thermomechanical and chemical recycling have capped the amount of recycled material available in the global supply chain because they cannot deal with certain types of plastic waste.
The damage they cause to plastic waste through the cycles also makes them highly inefficient, adding to demand for virgin resources.
One alternative is biobased recycling. Using enzymes – a biological chemical – we can break down plastics for up to 10 cycles. Each time, the plastic returns to a state that is of a similar quality to virgin materials.
The PET problem
Today, the international standard for commercial bio-recycling has been set by French chemicals firm Carbios.
Although still in the very earliest stages of commercialisation, the company has been making waves both in Europe and in China, where the company has a joint venture plant in the works.
Carbios’ bio-recycling R&D began in 2019 with a clear focus on PET plastics. Scientists had known that bio-recycling was a promising possibility for a long time. Yet until the early 2020s, nobody had come up with a process for doing it at cost and scale.
Carbios’ decision to focus on PET was based on prospective industry demand. PET’s dominance in the single use plastics market has made it the poster child for the plastic pollution crisis. Waste from PET bottles amounted to around 70 million tonnes in 2023.
The plastic waste crisis derives mainly from over-production, but also from a lack of viable recycling methods. Although PET can already be recycled cheaply through conventional thermomechanical methods, this can only happen 3 or 4 times, limiting its sustainability. Big food and drinks producers are looking for more sustainable options as scrutiny on their supply chains mount.
Carbios attempted to tap into this demand from the start, working closely with industry producers and their needs in mind. Suntory Group, a beverages company from Japan, was a key research partner when Carbios’ started its PET bio-recycling programme in 2019.
Two birds with one enzyme
Despite its work with Suntory, the beverage industry was not Carbios’ only target market. The company was also interested in the clothing industry – one of the world’s biggest consumers of PET.
In 2020, just one year after its PET bio-recycling programme began, Carbios produced its first plastic bottles using its enzymatic recycling process made entirely from waste textiles that were heavy in PET fibres.
This bottle demo was important because it showed the world that Carbios could recycle one of the most intractable types of plastic waste. By taking waste textiles industry and turning them into bottles, Carbios was showing the world that its tech could kill two birds with one stone: the ability to upcycle textiles that could otherwise enter the environment while also displacing virgin plastics demand from drinks bottles.
Crucially, the enzyme developed by the company only breaks down PET material. This selectiveness is what sets it apart from conventional recycling methods in the textile segment..
Conventional textile recycling methods struggle with blended material: think polycottons or materials that mix recycled with virgin plastics. Sorting and picking apart mixed fabrics would be astronomically expensive, which is why a lot of waste clothing simply gets landfilled. An enzyme that breaks down PET and only PET could make the textile recycling process much more tractacle.
Breakthrough
By 2020, Carbios’ research was paying dividends. In that year, researchers from the company and Toulouse Biotechnology Institute published a major article in Nature. It reported on a new enzyme that breaks down 90% of PET in just over 10 hours.
Once the enzymes had done their depolymerisation work, Carbios collaborated with Critt Bio-Industries in Toulouse to purify these basic building blocks and manufacture new bottles from them.
The PET-breaking enzyme at the heart of this process has humble origins. It was first discovered by Japanese researchers in a leaf-branch compost and was later refined by the company through bioengineering.
This was big news for the industry. Carbios’ technique was not only efficient and circular, it is easier on the plastic’s chemical structure than thermomechanical methods. This allows the material to stay functional through more cycles.
There were more triumphs in store for Carbios. By 2023, the scientific journal ACS Catalysis published that Carbios’ enzyme out-performed its competitors in a four-way experiment comparing it with enzymes developed in labs around the world.
The next step for Carbios was its first commercial-scale launch. This came in 2021 at its industrial demonstration plant in Clermont-Ferrand, France.
Recycling meets geostrategy
With this string of rapid successes, it seemed as though the final phase of development – industrial production – would be relatively straightforward for the company.
Yet economic and geopolitical realities have made commercial build-out a tumultuous time for the company.
Carbios initially set out to launch in France. In 2024, it promised its commercial-scale enzymatic PET plant in eastern France would be built and operational by 2026.
Yet by the end of 2024, Carbios had changed course. It postponed construction on its French site, pursued job cuts, and introduced a new restructuring programme to preserve cash.
In November 2025 came a controversial announcement. Carbios had entered a joint venture with Chinese company Wankai, one of China’s largest PET producers. The partnership will build Carbios’ bio-recycling capacity in Asia for the first time, with construction set to cost €115 million.
In many ways, a foreign launch is a savvy strategy. China is the world’s biggest PET market. Operating costs there are also far lower than in Europe, where skyrocketing energy prices hit the domestic chemical industry hard after the pandemic. The country is also the global powerhouse in chemical production, with a highly trained workforce and gleaming new infrastructure to boot.
Yet the partnership raised eyebrows back home. The Chinese venture announcement came before Carbios had finished building its French plant. French shareholder-aligned association ADISECT has been challenging the company to explain how the Chinese expansion might impact the viability of the French site.
The discontent around the new project threw up major legal hurdles for the company. Shareholders and commentators now believe the company is eyeing commercial launch and operations primarily in Asia.
An Asia-first strategy rankles European shareholders who view Carbios’ tech as a strategic asset for the French state, one that should generate value for its home economy before hitting foreign markets.
Whatever the outcome of these contests around Carbios’ strategy, one thing is clear: biorecycling biotech is a valuable piece of IP – enough to spark disputes around the geopolitical implications of a commercial launch abroad.
Transformative tech
Recycling has never been a catch-all solution to the global plastic crisis. Measures to cut overall demand and production still matter. However, tech like bio-recycling will be fundamental to building a less wasteful economy.
Bio-recycling could have the most significant impact in the textiles segment. Right now, blended materials and chemical additives make the costs of recycling many textiles prohibitive. Carbios’ selective enzymes may become the only viable way of dealing with this recalcitrant waste.
Carbios’ plastic-eating enzymes could also alter the economics of the packaging plastics industry. Here, the tech will not replace existing mechanical approaches but rather complement them.
Bio-recycling adds another tool in the waste management arsenal for bottles and single-use PET packaging, picking up where thermomechanical methods hit their limits and extending the life-cycle of plastics already out there in the economy.
The circular credentials of Carbios’ IP also means it can support state geostrategy. As geopolitical tensions make supply chains and trade more fragile, resource security is an increasing policy priority, in China, Europe, and beyond. Circular tech is becoming a part of this.
Carbios will become a test case in what happens when Europe’s historic lead in biotech innovation hits a declining industrial base. It will reveal whether European biotech companies can pursue corporate strategies guided purely by commercial concerns at a time when geopolitical rivalries cast a long shadow over the industry.
Whether or not Carbios pushes on with its controversial Asian pivot or not, its bio-recycling technology is on the cusp of transforming the recycling landscape forever.
The post How Carbios became the world’s first bio-recycling scaler appeared first on World Bio Market Insights.
- Source: https://worldbiomarketinsights.com/how-carbios-became-the-worlds-first-bio-recycling-scaler/
