In 2026, Carbios announced over 95% conversion in 24 hours on complex textile streams at Clermont-Ferrand. Biology has kept its promises: the enzyme works, the Longlaville project is suspended pending final financing, with Carbios planning to resume construction afterward. What is now missing for this process to truly change the economics of plastic is the infrastructure connecting the laboratory to the market.
The essentials
- Enzymatic recycling of PET is technically advanced for certain preprocessed streams, but it is not entirely resolved for all PET waste. The 2020 study reported at least 90% depolymerization in 10 hours on pretreated post-consumer PET, at 3 mg of enzyme per gram of PET.
- Longlaville is a project for the first commercial biorecycling plant for PET, whose start-up had not yet been established.
- The deployment of Longlaville remained principally conditioned on completion of its financing, while technical and economic validations were underway or announced as favorable.
- Regulatory demand exists; European packaging regulations impose growing rates of recycled content, but large-scale commercial supply was not yet operational and the Longlaville project had been delayed, while an industrial demonstrator was already functioning.
- The challenge for 2030-2035: understanding how petrochemical giants, new biotech entrants, and public mandates contribute to the financing, supply, and demand for this sector.
Ten years from sequencing to factory
In 2016, a Japanese team discovered a bacterium capable of degrading PET, polyethylene terephthalate, the plastic of bottles and textile fibers. The bacterium, Ideonella sakaiensis, produced two enzymes capable of hydrolyzing polymer chains into reusable monomers. The discovery published in Science caused a sensation. It demonstrated that nature had evolved, in less than sixty years of exposure to industrial plastic, to feed on it.
What the bacterium did slowly, Carbios decided to accelerate. The French company, founded in 2011 at Clermont-Ferrand, dedicated a decade to protein engineering. In 2020, it published in Nature a mutated version of PETase capable of working at 72°C, a temperature that softens plastic and accelerates the reaction. In 2022, new publications clarified the mechanisms of thermal stability. By 2025, the literature on PET hydrolases had produced several dozen articles in peer-reviewed journals, mapping active sites, optimization pathways, and kinetic limits.
Carbios announces over 95% conversion in 24 hours for complex post-consumer textiles tested in the demonstration unit at Clermont-Ferrand. The reference Nature publication reported at least 90% depolymerization in 10 hours on pretreated post-consumer PET, using notably 3 mg of enzyme per gram of PET. These conditions make this process the first to have achieved industrially plausible performance on real, unpurified plastic.
Longlaville, in Meurthe-et-Moselle, was to host a first commercial plant based on this process, but its operation since 2026 has not been established. This transition from pilot to factory is not a detail: dozens of promising technologies have died in this crossing.
Advantages of the process compared to mechanical recycling
Mechanical recycling of PET, melted, re-extruded, reconditioned, has existed since the 1990s. It works. It treats volumes. But it has a structural limit: each melting cycle degrades polymer chains. Mechanical recycling can degrade properties and limit the number of cycles, depending on the stream, additives, and reconditioning operations.
It descends in the hierarchy of uses, fibers, fillers, and ultimately exits the cycle.
Enzymatic recycling cuts plastic at its base. The enzyme breaks the ester bonds of PET to release its two monomers: terephthalic acid (TPA) and ethylene glycol (EG). These monomers are chemically identical to those derived from petroleum. They can be reinjected directly into a standard production line to manufacture new PET. The cycle is closed without loss of quality.
In theory, indefinitely.
Two other advantages deserve to be named. First, tolerance for contaminants: biorecycling can treat certain colored or complex PET streams after preparation, but it does not eliminate the need for separation from other polymers. Second, specificity: the enzyme is designed to hydrolyze PET and, more broadly, certain ester bonds in polyesters, without producing the heterogeneous mixtures that complicate mechanical recycling of composite packaging.
What the process does not do, however: Carbios’ industrial process currently targets PET, without constituting a solution to polyolefins. Polyethylene, polypropylene, polystyrene, which together represent the majority of plastic produced in the world, have different chemical structures, without ester bonds accessible to current hydrolases. Enzymatic recycling of PET is a response to a specific problem, not a general solution to plastic.
The bioreactor obstacle: when biology collides with industrial chemistry
The enzyme works. The factory runs. The process is not yet an economic certainty for several reasons.
The answer lies in two stages of the chain, upstream and downstream of the reactor.
Upstream, the enzyme must be produced in quantity. The protein is manufactured by fermentation of modified microorganisms that express it, then recovered after harvesting and cell lysis. At laboratory scale, fermentation is controlled. At industrial scale, it requires tanks of significant volume; the project calls for four reactors of 300 m³. The cost of producing enzyme at large scale remains one of the least published and most disputed variables in the sector.
Downstream, the monomers released in the reaction broth, terephthalic acid and ethylene glycol, must be separated from water, salts, pigments, and biological residues. This separation is energy-intensive. It determines the purity of the monomers and thus their market value. A 2024 publication in Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology on scaling enzymatic processes emphasizes mainly the limitations of available enzymes and the preprocessing of PET waste, without ranking product separation as the primary economic bottleneck.
The separation chemistry exists and has been practiced in the chemical industry for decades. Its integration into an aqueous process, at low temperature, on a heterogeneous substrate, requires specific engineering that sector players are still developing.
Regulatory demand pulls, industrial supply follows at a distance
Europe has created recycled content obligations capable of supporting demand, without guaranteeing a particular outlet for enzymatic recycling. Regulation (EU) 2025/40 requires 30% post-consumer recycled content for plastic beverage bottles from 2030, then 65% from 2040. Among Carbios’ historical partners are notably L’Oréal and Nestlé Waters. These obligations support demand for food-grade recycled PET.
Mechanical recycling may be insufficient for certain streams or quality requirements, creating a potential role for enzymatic recycling. Available volumes of food-grade mechanically recycled PET are limited by collection, sorting, and property degradation after multiple cycles. Enzymatic recycling, which produces recycled monomers of quality equivalent to virgin monomers from waste, responds exactly to this quality need. Regulation plays the role of catalyst that the market alone would not have provided at this pace.
Large-scale commercial supply was not yet operational. Longlaville is a project for a first commercial plant, not an established operational commercial factory. A single unit, even well-sized, cannot meet European demand. Scale-up assumes the construction of new units, which requires capital, industrial partners, and some visibility on the prices of monomers, themselves linked to petrochemical feedstock prices.
This link to oil is the most uncomfortable. Enzymatic TPA and EG are competitive when petrochemical monomers are expensive. When the barrel price falls, the window closes. Competitiveness depends on a set of economic and technical parameters, including costs of preprocessing, enzyme, separation, raw material, and industrial scale.
This challenge echoes other transitions where regulatory demand preceded industrial maturity. The case of critical raw materials shows that added value remains captured by whoever controls processing. In the case of enzymatic PET, control of fermentation and separation will determine market structure.
Who builds the sector
Three types of actors are positioned to finance and impose the supply chain, with very different logics.
Petrochemical giants, SABIC, Indorama, Eastman, currently produce virgin PET and control production lines. Some have invested in chemical recycling processes, notably glycolysis and methanization. They have the infrastructure, customers, and logistics networks. But their economic models are built on oil, and integrating enzymatic recycling amounts to competing with their own production. Eastman has developed its own chemical recycling pathway through methanization, which directly competes with the enzymatic approach.
The neutrality of these actors toward Carbios’ process is questionable.
New biotech entrants, led by Carbios, but also emerging startups in Asia and the United States, have the technology but lack capital and distribution networks. Their economic model relies on licenses granted to industrialists, which allows them to scale up without building infrastructure themselves. Carbios has already concluded licensing agreements with Asian industrialists.
Consumer brands, a third type of actor, have regulatory obligations and sustainable development budgets, but not the industrial expertise to build recycling plants. They can finance the sector through long-term purchase contracts for recycled monomers, thus securing upstream investments.
The most likely configuration for 2030 is not the monopoly of one type of actor but a hybrid chain: technology licensed by biotechs, fermentation outsourced to specialty chemical industrialists, separation integrated into existing petrochemical sites, monomers sold under contract to brands. This model distributes value and risks without requiring a single actor to carry the entire burden.
Remaining conditions for scale-up
Available data come from the demonstration unit at Clermont-Ferrand, not from a commercial operation at Longlaville. Commercial operating parameters remain to be documented due to the absence of an established start-up.
Two technical barriers remain active. The first is enzyme performance under continuous operating conditions. Laboratory tests are often conducted over 24 or 48 hours. A continuous industrial process imposes specific operating constraints, notably enzyme lifespan over long periods of operation.
Published work on NCBI and bioRxiv examines strategies for immobilizing enzyme on solid supports to make it reusable, with promising results but still to be confirmed at scale.
The second barrier is adapting the process to real waste stream variability. Collected PET bottles are not all identical. Additives, dyes, barrier coatings vary from manufacturer to manufacturer and country to country. Adapting the process to real collection variability, beyond the standardized samples of publications, must be documented through demonstration trials and, subsequently, validated through commercial operation.
If these barriers are lifted, the deployment potential is real: the global market for plastic-degrading enzymes is in growth over the 2026-2032 period, according to Verified Market Research, driven by European regulatory demand and voluntary commitments from major brands. The conditions for a viable sector exist. They await their industrial translation.
The real unknown for 2035 is whether a single Longlaville unit will suffice to demonstrate the profitability of the process at a scale that triggers subsequent investments, or whether the sector will need an additional regulatory lever, such as a floor price on carbon for fossil monomers, for the economic equation to close without permanent subsidy.
Sources
- Springer / Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology (2024), scaling up enzymatic PET: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00253-024-13222-2
- Carbios, Longlaville plant operational data 2026 (official Carbios press releases, carbios.com)
- Nature (2020), Publication of Carbios’ thermostable enzyme: Tournier V. et al., An engineered PET depolymerase to break down and recycle plastic bottles, Nature, vol. 580
- Science (2016), Discovery of Ideonella sakaiensis: Yoshida S. et al., A bacterium that degrades and assimilates poly(ethylene terephthalate), Science, vol. 351
- Verified Market Research, Global market for plastic-degrading enzymes, 2026-2032 report
- NCBI/PMC, Publications on immobilization of PET hydrolases and enzyme reusability (bioRxiv, peer-reviewed journals 2023-2025)
- European Packaging Regulation (PPWR), PET recycled content rates, 2024, Official Journal of the EU
