Puma, On and Salomon Help Carbios Launch Polyester Recycling Innovation
French biological technologies firm Carbios has launched a new textile preparation line that will streamline polyester recycling.
Located at the company’s demonstration plant in Clermont-Ferrand, the patented, automated line transitions used garments or cutting scraps into raw material suitable for depolymerization through Carbios’ enzymatic biorecycling process. The innovation replaces a process that has been traditionally done by hand, according to the company.
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The textiles preparation line was inaugurated on Monday with French Minister for Industry Roland Lescure in attendance. It integrates several stages, including shredding and extracting components like buttons, zippers and other fasteners, into a scalable development tool. According to Carbios, the line will help the company to expand its biorecycling capabilities at the plant by next year.
The line will also help the firm facilitate deeper relationships with local collection and sortation groups, who will need to coordinate with Carbios to provide quality textiles for the enzymatic recycling process. The expertise gleaned through the piloting of the program will also serve brands looking to design with end-of-life in mind.
“Textile recycling is a major issue, as the need for solutions to manage the life cycle of these products is critical,” Lescure said. Just 13 percent of global textile waste is currently being recycled, with the remaining 87 percent landfilled or incinerated.
“Carbios is contributing in the creation of a French recycling industry,” he added. “Thanks to its know-how and its innovative, collaborative spirit, Carbios is providing a solution—cutting-edge and made in France—to what was until now a real obstacle to textile recycling.”
According to Carbios, textile-to-textile recycling has been hampered by the limited infrastructure for sorting and preparing textiles, with collection rates averaging just 15 percent to 25 percent globally. Most waste is shipped to Africa, Asia or Latin America from the Western hemisphere for sorting, and much of it ends up in dumpsites.
“Textile preparation is an essential step for recycling: without a solution for textile preparation, there is no recycling industry, and no textile circularity,” Carbios CEO Emmanuel Ladent said. Modern apparel is commonly made with complex fabric blends. Because separating the different fibers in these textiles is challenging, most textiles are currently sorted by hand, resulting in low raw material yields for recycling. The addition of sundries such as buttons further complicates the process.
“Textile preparation is an essential step for recycling—without a solution for textile preparation, there is no recycling industry, and no textile circularity,” Ladent added. “The output from our new preparation line is ready to be directly integrated into our biorecycling process, which enables closed-loop ‘fiber to fiber’ recycling—a strong demand from the brands we work with.”
“I would like to thank the French Government for its support throughout the industrialization and internationalization of our technology,” he said.
Carbios uses on a highly selective enzyme that depolymerizes and separates the PET content from a blended textile. But before this takes place, textiles must be loaded onto the line and shredded and have any trims such as buttons and zippers removed. The line is able to process 300 kg (about 661 pounds) of textiles per hour.
European sportswear brands Puma, Salomon and On Holding represented the Fiber-to-Fiber Consortium, an initiative founded by Carbios in 2022, at the inauguration event, noting that the preparation line “completes the work in progress with the Fiber-to-fiber Consortium on biorecycling and will accelerate the industrial development of Carbios’ technology.” Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger parent PVH Corp. joined the Consortium earlier this year.
The group aims to see the biorecycling of textiles take place at demonstration-plant scale in 2024, with textile collection from throughout Europe beginning in 2025, when the EU will mandate the separate collection of textile waste. By 2030, the EU aims to implement a minimum recycled content mandate for textiles.
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