Advanced BioFuels USA

by Helena Tavares Kennedy (Biofuels Digest) Carbios will knock your socks off with their enzyme tech that is now converting textile waste and your old polyester socks and sweaters into clear plastic bottles. We’ve heard of clothing made from plastic bottles like Patagonia’s fleece vests, but now Carbios is making it happen the other way. And with ‘fast fashion’ and record-breaking tons of clothing going into landfills, their tech could help solve a huge global problem.

In today’s Digest, the path to commercialization, the enzymatic depolymerization process that makes the magic happen, why this textiles to plastic bottles tech is so hot, an exclusive Digest interview with Carbios leadership, and more…and it’s ready for you now at The Digest online.

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… 95% of all textiles have the potential to be reused or recycled, but currently they are recycled at a rate of only 15%.

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So the fact that Carbios has produced the first clear plastic bottles from enzymatically recycled textile waste is a huge step forward in helping textiles and fast fashion turn itself around into a more circular industry.

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 Around 85% of all textiles thrown away in the U.S. are either dumped into landfills or burned, and globally, just 12% of the material used for clothing ends up being recycled. Carbios’ process, using highly specific enzymes, allows textile waste to be recovered and converted into a high quality grade of PET plastic, suitable for bottles.

CARBIOS is a company known for pioneering new enzymatic solutions to reinvent the lifecycle of plastic and textile polymers, and now that it has successfully produced the first bottles containing 100% recycled Purified Terephthalic Acid (rPTA) from textile waste that contains a high PET content, we see it becoming an even bigger name.

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Currently, mechanical recycling technologies do not enable clothing waste to be recycled efficiently. The few textiles that can be reused are incorporated into lower quality applications such as padding, insulators or rags. This process is called “downcycling”.

In contrast, the breakthrough developed by Carbios enables polyester  textile fibers to be “upcycled” in a high quality grade of PET suitable for the production of clear bottles.

“This result demonstrates the extent of our technology’s possibilities: We can now produce transparent bottles from polyester textile waste or from post-consumer colored bottles. This works both ways – so we can also make a t-shirt from bottles or disposable food trays,” said Professor Marty (Professor Alain Marty, Chief Scientific Officer of Carbios). Indeed, Carbios has succeeded in producing PET fibers for textile applications with 100% rPTA, from enzymatically recycled PET plastic waste.

Carbios’ enzymatic recycling technology fully breaks down any kind of post-consumer PET plastic into its original building blocks (i.e., monomers). These can then be used to produce PET plastics that are equal to virgin ones – examples include bottles and packaging.

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As for what the future holds, Stephan (Martin Stephan, the Deputy CEO at Carbios) told The Digest, “We plan to license our unique enzymatic recycling process to PET producers by the end of 2022 / beginning of 2023.”  READ MORE