A novel recycling method could turn millions of tonnes of plastic waste into raw materials for new products. French biotech company Carbios is building the world's first commercial enzyme-based PET recycling plant in Longlaville, northeastern France. What sets the process apart from conventional recycling: it works on brightly printed, multi-layer, and opaque packaging that previously ended up in landfills or was incinerated.
How Enzymes Break Down Plastic
Conventional mechanical recycling shreds plastic and melts it down, but loses quality with each cycle and fails on colored or multi-layer packaging. Carbios's approach is fundamentally different: a genetically improved enzyme variant catalyzes the chemical cleavage of PET's polymer bonds. The result is terephthalic acid and ethylene glycol, precisely the raw materials from which PET was originally made.
These monomers can be processed directly into new virgin-quality PET. That is the decisive difference from mechanical recycling, where quality losses compound after each cycle and the range of possible applications narrows. Because the process completely breaks the material down into its starting components, it can in principle cycle through indefinitely without quality loss. The plant can also process polyester fabric alongside packaging, the most widely used synthetic fiber in the textile industry, for which almost no recycling solutions currently exist.
Contracts with L'Oréal, Beverage Industry, and Textile Partners
The plant in Longlaville is designed to process 50,000 tonnes of prepared waste per year at an estimated construction cost of 230 million euros. Carbios has already signed several long-term offtake agreements for the recycled PET: cosmetics companies L'Oréal and L'Occitane en Provence signed initial delivery contracts in May 2025. In November 2025, two further multi-year contracts followed with major beverage producers. For raw material supply, Carbios signed a framework agreement for 15,000 tonnes annually with German waste management company Hündgen.
Carbios is also developing a partnership with textile recycling company Nouvelles Fibres Textiles to process polyester fabric from the fashion industry through the enzyme process. This is technically significant: polyester accounts for more than 50 percent of all textile fibers produced globally, and almost no conventional recycling process can handle it.
Financing Challenges Delay Construction
Despite secured customer demand, Carbios has struggled to close its full financing structure. At the end of 2024, the company postponed the construction start by six to nine months because financing was not yet fully in place. A further three-month delay followed at the end of 2025. As of March 2026, talks with financing partners are continuing: Carbios has secured 42.5 million euros in public funding but is still awaiting formal approval in the EU Official Journal before the funds can be disbursed. The total budget of 230 million euros is not yet fully covered.
The goal is to close the financing by the third quarter of 2026. If construction starts in the second half of 2026, the company expects production to begin in the second half of 2027. Carbios emphasizes that the delays have not affected commercial demand and that the technology itself is ready to deploy.
The Scale of the Problem
PET is one of the most widely produced plastics in the world, used in beverage bottles, food packaging, and textile fibers. Global annual production exceeds 80 million tonnes; according to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, less than 15 percent is recycled. Most unrecycled PET ends up in landfills or is incinerated, and a portion enters the environment.
Carbios is not the only company researching enzyme-based plastic recycling, but it is the only one to have brought a commercially scalable process to the factory threshold. Competitors such as Dutch company Ioniqa are working on related chemical approaches. If the financing comes together and the plant runs as planned, Longlaville would be the first facility in the world to prove that enzymatic biorecycling works at industrial scale.