Carbios Expands Enzymatic Recycling Licensing to Textile Market

French biotechnology company Carbios has expanded its enzymatic recycling licensing offering to the textile sector after successfully completing 100 production trial batches at its industrial demonstration plant in Clermont-Ferrand, France. The milestone supports the commercialization of the company's technology for recycling polyester-rich textile waste alongside PET packaging.

Since 2025, Carbios has been adapting its enzymatic biorecycling process to treat post-consumer textile waste containing high concentrations of PET (polyethylene terephthalate) polyester. The company said the latest production trials were conducted under conditions representative of industrial-scale operations, demonstrating the process can handle complex textile waste streams with consistent performance.

According to Carbios, its enzymatic depolymerization technology achieved more than 95% conversion within 24 hours when processing complex textile waste. The process recovered virgin-quality monomers comparable to those produced from recycled PET packaging, with consistent results across repeated production batches.

The successful completion of 100 industrial-scale batches demonstrates the maturity and reproducibility of the technology, enabling the company to process a broad range of PET waste streams, including both packaging and textile materials with varying levels of complexity.

The expansion marks an important step in Carbios’ commercialization strategy by extending its licensing model beyond the packaging sector. The company said the textile market represents a significantly larger opportunity, with global consumption of PET polyester fibers estimated at approximately 67 million tonnes annually, nearly double the size of the PET packaging market.

By offering its technology to textile manufacturers and recyclers, Carbios aims to address one of the industry’s major circularity challenges: the recycling of post-consumer polyester textiles, which have traditionally been difficult to recycle into high-quality raw materials.

The broader licensing offering is expected to diversify the company’s customer base while expanding the potential application of its enzymatic recycling platform across global PET value chains.

Carbios has positioned enzymatic depolymerization as an alternative recycling technology capable of recovering high-purity monomers from complex PET waste that is difficult to process through conventional mechanical recycling methods.

Source: Carbios

SUNSHINE Spotlight: Carbios’ expansion into textile recycling reflects growing commercial interest in enzymatic technologies capable of converting complex polyester waste into virgin-quality raw materials for circular textile production.