Engineered Plastic-Eating Enzymes Break Down PET Bottles in Under 24 Hours; First Industrial Plant Opens in France

♻️ Industrial-Scale Enzymatic Recycling Arrives

Carbios, the French pioneer in enzymatic plastic recycling, inaugurated the world's first industrial-scale enzymatic PET recycling plant in Longlaville, near the Belgian and Luxembourg borders, on May 20, 2026. The EUR 230 million facility has a nameplate capacity to process 50,000 metric tons of post-consumer PET waste annually, equivalent to roughly 2 billion plastic bottles, using an engineered variant of leaf-branch compost cutinase, an enzyme originally discovered in compost by Carbios scientists screening microbial communities.

The process works by grinding PET waste including colored bottles, food trays, and polyester textiles into flakes, which are then immersed in an aqueous enzyme solution at 72 degrees Celsius. The engineered LCC enzyme, further optimized through directed evolution over more than a decade of research, cleaves the ester bonds of PET polymer chains, depolymerizing the plastic into its constituent monomers, purified terephthalic acid (PTA) and monoethylene glycol (MEG), with 98% efficiency within 16 to 24 hours.

These monomers are chemically indistinguishable from petrochemical-derived PTA and MEG and can be re-polymerized into virgin-quality PET resin, enabling true circular bottle-to-bottle recycling. This contrasts with mechanical recycling, which degrades polymer quality with each cycle due to heat and shear stress.

Carbios has secured long-term offtake agreements with L'Oréal, Nestlé Waters, PepsiCo, and Suntory Beverage and Food Europe, all of which have committed to using enzymatically recycled PET in their packaging. L'Oréal already sells a line of skincare products in Carbios-recycled bottles under the Garnier brand. The Longlaville plant employs approximately 150 people and sources feedstock from the surrounding Grand Est region's municipal recycling programs.

📋 Beyond PET: Enzymes for Polyurethane, Nylon, and Mixed Textiles

While PET comprises about 12% of global plastic production and has seen the most progress in biological recycling, researchers have now identified and engineered enzymes that degrade a wider range of plastics. A collaboration between the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado and the MIT Department of Chemical Engineering published findings in Science in May 2026 on engineered cutinase and esterase variants that efficiently depolymerize polyurethane foam and nylon 6,6, two widely used plastics for which mechanical recycling has been largely ineffective.

The enzymes were discovered through metagenomic screening of plastic-polluted environmental samples from landfills, marine sediment, and wastewater treatment plants using functional screening.

The critical bottleneck identified by the NREL-MIT team is not enzyme activity but rather the accessibility of polymer chains to enzymatic attack within mixed-material products. Most post-consumer plastic waste streams contain blends of different polymers, dyes, additives, and fiber reinforcements that shield ester bonds. The group is developing pretreatment technologies including selective solvent swelling and mechanical delamination to expose polymer surfaces before enzymatic treatment.

At the University of Portsmouth's Centre for Enzyme Innovation, directed by Professor John McGeehan, researchers have discovered cold-active PET-degrading enzymes from Antarctic soil and deep-sea sediment microbiomes that function at ambient temperatures between 10 and 30 degrees Celsius, eliminating the energy-intensive heating step required by Carbios's process. While these cold-active enzymes currently work 50-100x slower than Carbios's thermotolerant LCC variant, further directed evolution could make ambient-temperature plastic degradation economically viable and perhaps eventually enable in situ bioremediation of plastic-polluted environments.