Virgin PET from plastic waste
Carbios, a green chemistry company specialising in enzymatic bioprocesses applied to plastic and textile polymers, and TechnipFMC, a leading company in the fields of energy, chemistry and bio-sourced industries, announce the launch of a project for the industrial development of Carbios PET enzymatic recycling process. This will allow to produce virgin PET from plastic waste. This contract covers assistance to Carbios for the scale up of its process to ensure industrial competitiveness.
Carbios’ proprietary innovation provides an industrial solution to fulfill sustainable development requirements of PET production processes. The global market of PET records a 4% to 5% annual growth according to Smithers Pira and Pira International, and represents a world production of 64 million tons each year (eq. $70 billion) (source: SRI Consulting in 2010, ICIS in 2009, Samsung in 2010, Tecnon in 2013 and IHS in 2014), split between one third of plastics and two thirds of fibres. In 10 years’ time, the annual production of this market is expected to reach 100 million tons (eq. $110 billion).
This process has been developed for the recycling of PET plastics, namely bottles, films and packaging. It enables to overcome constraints and limits of current recycling processes by the treatment of all kind of plastics containing PET (transparent, coloured, opaque and complex), and by the recovery of high-performance virgin PET directly from plastic waste. For the first time, a biological process paves the way to infinite recycling of PET following circular economy principles.
The companies signed this contract to transpose Carbios’ process from the laboratory to the pilot scale. This assistance will further aim at supporting the development of the project and define the bases of the industrial process.
