Interview: Martin Stephan, Deputy Managing Director, Carbios

Nous avons tous porté un jour un pull en « laine polaire », fabriqué à partir de bouteilles en polyester recyclées.

The boundaries between the world of textiles, chemistry, and plastic has long since become extremely porous.At the heart of concerns, understanding the synthetic matter often a source of pollution of our environment.And at the crossroads of these worlds, innovation which makes it possible to find new paths necessarily more virtuous of manufacturing, use, and management of the end of life and recycling of this material.

Imagine a technology that would allow, conversely, to recycle your clothes in polyester (PET) used directly in transparent bottles, and perhaps even in textile wire to make new clothes ... This is what recently succeededTo make Carbios, a French technological company pioneer in the development of enzymatic processes rethinking the end of life of plastic and textile polymers.A break -up innovation, a world premiere that opens the way to the industrialization of a sustainable and circular solution to combat global plastic pollution.

Carbios has made this sustainable innovation and commitment to the circular economy its DNA.With its technological know-how, it therefore produced the first bottles containing 100 % recycled purified dark acid (RPTA) from high-content textile waste.This innovative technology of enzymatic waste recycling is completely part of the European objectives of circular economy and environmental protection.

Objectives that the textile sector must imperatively integrate, to meet the new requirements of regulations, consumers, and more broadly from our planet.Martin Stephan, Deputy Managing Director of Carbios, agreed to present this pioneering process to us, allowing infinite valuation of low -value waste and gives them a new life in more demanding applications, but also to tell us about the challenges ofBiorecyclage for the future of the textile-accommodation sector.

Could you explain in a few words the principle of polyester biorecycling proposed by Carbios?

Carbios is the first and only society in the world to develop biological technologies for the end of life of plastics and textiles.Our concept is based on using enzymes not to trigger biological reactions, as happens in our own body for example during digestion, but to trigger a chemical reaction.

This reaction is called depolymerization because it allows to deconstruct polymers channels.In other words, the enzymatic reaction will break a chain made up of several molecules (monomers), which is the case with polyester.The depolymerization of the polyester makes it possible to chemically decompose the PET into its two basic monomers: dark acid and monoethylene glycol.This enzymatic process is followed by a step of purification of monomers, by more classic chemical engineering, which allows us to recover these monomers which can be repolymerized in a polyester equivalent to the Virgin PET.And the cycle can be repeated endlessly!

This is the first biological approach allowing to infinitely recycle PET plastics.The original enzyme was discovered in nature but in this form, its thermal stability and its activity of depolymerization of the PET were not sufficient for an industrial cycle.The two properties have been greatly improved by Carbios and its academic partners.

This biorecycling process competes with mechanical recycling and other types of chemical recycling processes.How do you position yourself in relation to these technologies?

Currently, mechanical recycling technologies do not allow textile waste to be truly recycled in closed loop.This mechanical recycling is in fact very often closer to reuse than to real recycling of the material, because it does not recreate a virgin textile material from used textile materials.They are simply reused after fraying in padding, insulator or rag applications.This is what we call "down-cycling".

Other types of recycling exist such as recycled cotton spinning, but which requires integration on the one hand virgin polyester to reach a level of sufficient textile quality, or the manufacture of the famous "polar wool" in polyester from theRecycling plastic bottles.These processes raises the question of the end of life of the product, since the cycle is not infinite, the quality of the recycled product degrading each new recycling phase.There are also color issues, as all bottles cannot be recycled in textile material.So these are not closed loops.

Regarding chemical recycling, glycolysis or metabolise processes have been existing for several years, but obviously do not give results satisfactory enough to truly impose on the market.I am not a specialist in other enzymatic processes developed in the research laboratories applied to textile fibers of the wool or cellulose type, but the tendency to develop these technologies is rather encouraging.

To really talk about recycling the polyester, it is necessary to arrive at a "fiber to fiber" cycle and no longer to stay on a process "bottle to fiber".A process like that of Carbios is very tolerant on basic material, especially on colors, and gives an amazing range of qualities.We operate with specific enzymes, at low temperature and with aqueous -based processes, unlike glycolysis which requires higher temperatures and the use of solvents.

A very large volume of textiles used in the world is made from material mixture, in particular cotton and polyester, the famous "polycoton", which poses a problem during the sorting stages before recycling.Is it the possibility of working with your process on this type of multi-material fabric?

Indeed, it is possible to recycle the polyester of a mixture of polycoton, and to produce recycled polyester of very good quality.Cotton waste, for their part, cannot be recycled as they are by our process.However, cotton remains an organic matter which generates less final pollution than the PET.

We are often asked when we can recycle all the mixed materials.We can only answer that it is necessary to advance step by step.The innovation developed by Carbios allows an "up-cycling" of the material by allowing, from textile fibers to produce a grade of recycled PET adapted to bottle applications.By already recycling the PET, we address a market that represents more than half of the textile fibers used in the world.

Precisely, have you ever started working directly with actors in the Textile clothing sector?

I was still chatting recently with major brands, especially sportswear.If most of their environmental actions remain interesting, they are not sufficient in view of the problem of plastic pollution in the world.It is high time to move on to large -scale actions, having a real impact on the product value chain and the environment.All initiatives taken for a few years, such as Fashion for Good or Fashion Pact, are obviously essential, because they allow to communicate, mobilize, and support many small innovation projects, but it still lacksconcretization.And time is starting to fail in terms of decrease in impacts.But let's stay optimistic because the lines start to move, as with the announcement last March of a plastics recycling project between Technip Energies (ex Technip FMC), specialist in PET, and the sports equipment manufacturer under Armor.

We put at the service of brands and the textile-habment industry a process which, we think, is capable of revolutionizing the end of life of their products.It is absolutely crucial that these actors are proactive in this area, because it is their responsibility to manage this step, in the eyes of an increasingly demanding and more and more informed consumer.Let's not expect media and NGOs they put pressure on businesses, innovation today allows you to meet the needs! The recent revelation of the treatment of unsold clothing stocks, which are cremated, shocked manyfellow citizens.The law against waste is a new regulatory step on the path of recycling and the circular economy, but awareness is already very real.The more the sector will mobilize, the greater the volumes will be, the more we limit the impact of our consumption on the planet.

What do you think are the main brakes to lift today to pass this CAP from biorecycling in the clothing textile industry?

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The main difficulty we encounter today to integrate actors in clothing textiles into our innovation projects is the difference in rhythm, temporality. Il est souvent difficile pour une marque d’imaginer investir dans un projet de R&D d’au moins trois ans alors qu’elle sort aux moins deux collections par an. Elle peut également faire face à un manque de moyens financiers mobilisables, mais aussi de ressources internes en R&D.

Without engineers chemists or materials, our technologies may seem complicated to apprehend.Certain textile industrial SMEs are of course able to innovate, alone or with several, but let us not forget that in terms of clothing they are the brands the real principals, it is therefore to them to give theways to make things happen.A break in rupture requires time and a significant investment.Now innovating today is a necessary condition for surviving within a complicated economic environment.

Adidas has announced that he wanted to achieve 100 % recycled PET use in 2024.It seems to me that it will be very difficult to reach them, there will not be enough recycled pet to meet this goal.If all the big brands want to do the same thing, there will not be something for everyone.In addition, if we look at the universe of packaging, the recycled fart cost 50 % of the dear that the virgin fart.Unscrupulous suppliers therefore offer virgin pets under a false recycled pet name, and increase their margins!And this problem also exists in the field of textile fiber in recycled material.There is a cruel need for traceability, of certification, for the market is finally standardized.

We started to solicit the textile sector in 2018-2019, when we trained a consortium integrating in particular L'Oréal, to work widely on packaging and textile fiber.But at that time, no textile industrialist or other clothing brand wished to invest in this project, only industrialists in other sectors such as Pepsico, Nestlé Waters and Suntory Beverage and Food Europe (Orangina Schweppes in France) werevolunteer.Fortunately, awareness begins in some brands of sportswear, outdoor, which have spontaneously have contact with us for the past few weeks.

In Europe, the obligation to build clothes for collecting clothing in 2025 will necessarily accelerate reflection on recycling!What to do with tons of textiles that will be recovered?Burning or buried them are not possible as sustainable solutions, the impact on the environment is no longer acceptable.It is necessary to take this step towards closed loop recycling.All this is slowly putting yourself in place.I often quote terms of an article published in the journal Science on this problem, according to which the effort must be collective, global and coordinated;that it is necessary to increase the capacities of the collection sectors;and finally you have to invest in more technologies.

A new crucial step is announced for Carbios, with the construction of the industrial demonstrator of this rupture technology, in Auvergne Rhône-Alpes.Where is the project?

The demonstrator will start at the start of the school year in September-October 2021, as planned.Its role as its name suggests is to demonstrate that technology is exploitable on an industrial scale. Des données et retours d’expériences seront dans ce but recueillis durant 12 à 18 mois, qui nous permettront d’écrire le « process design package », un document décrivant très précisément tout le procédé_, une « bible » nécessaire lorsque l’on souhaite vendre une licence sur une technologie.

With this document, the first licensees should, according to our forecasts, be able to build an industrial treatment line up to 50,000 tonnes/year.Ultimately, we want to sell licenses for production capacities up to 200,000 tonnes.We asked Technip Energies, our project engineering partner, to build the line so that we can guarantee, on the basis of the usual extrapolation factors, to easily switch from the demonstrator to a 150,000 tonnes.Carbios' economic model is based on these forecast sales licenses by 2023, but also on the sale of enzymes, the real catalysts of the reaction.

We own the enzyme specifically developed and used in our technology, but it is the company specializing in Novozymes enzymes that is responsible for its production.Novozymes, who is a leader in the sector with 50 years of experience and 50 % market share, has agreed to sign a development contract, a "joint development agrement" with Carbios, in which the company undertakes to develop the microphone-Organism necessary and specific to the production of our enzyme.

Are the passage through industrial property and patent filing essential in your sector?

The patent is essential in our field of activity, because the potential is enormous and it is the only way to protect yourself effectively.Our forces today are our 38 families of patents and our team.We therefore make every effort to retain our employees, around forty today and probably about fifty at the end of 2021.

The patent credits technology, as we have also done our article published in the prestigious scientific review Nature, and also helps us to lift the funds necessary for our development.Patents are not only filed, but issued in target countries.And the team is also credible in the eyes of investors and partners thanks in particular to a long experience, often more than thirty years, of several employees and managers in the chemistry sector.

Before its biorecycling technology, Carbios has patented and industrialized a technology for biodegradation of polylactic acid (PLA), now managed by a company called Carbiolice.PLA is starting to be used in the textile sector also, although it is more marginal than other materials.Can we ultimately consider proposing end-of-life solutions of the PLA to the textile sector as well?

Today, our technology concerning PLA, mainly used as a more sustainable alternative in the packaging sector, aims to improve its biodegradability in domestic conditions, to overcome the restrictive conditions of industrial composting.The technology is also a little different, since it is a question of integrating a specific enzyme inside the PLA during its manufacture, more precisely at the last stage of PLA processing, which will allow it to betterdegrade during composting.Carbiolice offers a masterbach, a mixer-master, containing the enzyme which is to be mixed with.

Today, Carbiolice is focused on films and packaging, but it is not impossible to consider working on PLA textile fiber in the years to come, according to the needs of the.Biopolymers' actors like NatureWorks or Total Corbion offer PLA for the textile industry, for the Non -Non -Settlements.And this PLA market is extremely tense, demand is strong in biopolymers, new production capacities are emerging to meet the needs.

How do you see the future of Carbios and more broadly biorecycling?

A brilliant future without a doubt!We continue to develop technologies for PET, more broadly end -of -life technologies for plastics and textiles.Ultimately we hope to have several million tonnes of PET treated in the world under a carbios license.Today, more than 79 million tonnes of PET are produced each year, it's colossal!Perhaps in the long term, perhaps twenty, thirty years, or more, we could imagine a world where the fart consumed in the world would no longer come from petrochemicals but would be generated in a closed loop from waste from wastePet ... it's an optimistic but extremely motivating vision! Do we don't say that "wanting is power", let's already have this desire to aim for this ultimate objective to hope to reach it one day.

And so when the industrialization of PET is advanced, we will have to imagine the next research project on a new polymer.Will it be polyamide, polyurethane ... all the tracks are possible.

Interview by N.Right - April 2021

Photo credit ©: Jérôme Pallé / Carbios