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Since single-use plastics are largely derived from petroleum, by 2050 plastics can account for 20% of the world’s annual oil consumption. Reducing our dependence on plastic and finding ways to reuse the plastic that is already in the world can greatly reduce emissions.

Currently, only about 15% of all plastics It is collected for recycling every year around the world. Researchers have been trying to find new ways to break down plastics since the 1990s, in hopes of recycling more of it. Companies and researchers have worked to develop enzymatic processes like those used in Carbios. chemical processeslike the method used by Loop Industries. However, enzymatic and chemical processes have only recently begun to be commercialized.

Carbios’ new reactor is about 20 cubic meters in size – the size of a cargo van. It can hold two metric tons of plastic, or the equivalent of about 100,000 crushed bottles, at a time and break it down into the building blocks of PET (ethylene glycol and terephthalic acid) in 10 to 16 hours.

The company plans to use what it learned from the demonstration facility to build its first industrial facility, which will house a reactor approximately 20 times larger than the demonstration reactor. This full-scale plant will be built next to a plastics manufacturer in Europe or the US and will be operational by 2025, he says. Alain Marty, chief scientist of Carbios.

Carbios has been developing enzymatic recycling since it was founded in 2011. Its process relies on enzymes to break down the long polymer chains that make up the plastic. The resulting monomers can then be purified and stacked together to make new plastics. Researchers at Carbios started with a natural enzyme used by bacteria to break down leaves, then modified it to make it more efficient at breaking down PET.

Carbios estimates that the enzymatic recycling process reduces greenhouse gas emissions by approximately 30% compared to virgin PET. Marty says he expects that number to increase as we sort out the confusion.

soon reportResearchers estimate that producing PET from enzymatic recycling can reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 17% to 43% compared to producing pure PET. The report wasn’t specifically about Carbios, but it’s probably a good guess for its process. Gregg Beckham, a researcher at the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory and co-author of the report.

While developing new enzymes will be the main focus of new research and commercial efforts, other parts of the process will determine how efficient and cost-effective the technology will be, Beckham says. a consortium about new plastic recycling and production methods.

“It’s all less attractive stuff,” says Beckham, which can take a lot of energy and time and increase emissions and costs, such as putting plastic into a form that enzymes can break down efficiently or separating what the enzymes spit out. .