Carbios announced it is postponing construction of its PET depolymerisation plant in Longlaville, France, by six to nine months.
The French biotech company broke ground on the facility, totted as the world’s first PET biorecycling plant, in April 2024.
It is now postponing construction due to delayed funding.
Carbios obtained non-dilutive funding of €30 million under the France 2030 programme, which aims to stimulate employment, boost productivity and increase the competitiveness of French businesses. The company said the subsidy has been approved but its release is pending authorisation by the European Commission.
The biotech company is also waiting on €12.5 million from the Grand Est Region, where the plant is located.
Carbios said in a statement that its negotiations with Indorama Ventures are not yet finalised. In June 2023, the companies signed a non-binding Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to form a joint venture to build the plant. According to the terms of the MOU, Indorama Ventures will mobilise about €110 million for the joint venture in equity and non-convertible loan financing, pending final engineering documentation and final economic feasibility studies.
The total capital investment for the new plant is re-estimated to be around €230 million, considering recent impact from inflation.
The company said it has entered discussions with other private and public financial institutions likely to provide financing for the project ‘under favourable conditions’.
It added that the French State, through the country’s investment bank Bpifrance, has given its ‘potential support’ for debt coverage of €86 million under the Strategic Projects Guarantee (GPS) scheme.
Carbios said the postponement does not call ‘the plant construction into question’. The company said it had cash reserves of €92.8 million as of Nov. 30, 2024, supplemented by €19.6 million in term deposits classified as financial assets. It assured it is ‘well-positioned to meet its needs beyond the next twelve months’.
“To ensure the prudent execution of our strategy and safeguard our cash flow in a complex environment, we are postponing construction of the plant in line with the expected timetable for public grants and the negotiation of the necessary additional non-dilutive financing,” said Philippe Pouletty, founder and chairman of the board of directors at Carbios.
The postponement announcement was accompanied by a change of governance at the company. Pouletty replaced Emmanuel Ladent as CEO on Dec. 18 on an interim basis, as the board of directors recruits a new CEO.
Carbios now expects to start supplying recycled PET in 2027 rather than 2026. It also expects to sign ‘several’ binding commercial contracts in the first half of 2025.
The Longlaville plant is expected to process about 50,000 tonnes of post-consumer PET waste per year, equivalent to 2 billion PET coloured bottles or 2.5 billion PET trays. The plot on which the plant is being built offers space to double the capacity in the future.
Carbios’ enzymatic depolymerisation process enables the efficient and solvent-free recycling of PET plastic and textile waste into virgin-equivalent products.