Carbios is further advancing its enzymatic recycling process. The company has now announced its decision to build a demonstration plant in the French Chemical Valley, near Lyon.
Construction, said Carbios, will start later this year with operations expected to commence in the second half of 2021.
Asked about the capacity of the plant, the company noted that ‘capacity is not really relevant for a demonstration plant. The sizing of this project aims to provide sufficient data for our first licensees to build 50 000 to 100 000-ton capacity plants’.
Carbios has selected TechnipFMC as its collaboration partner on the project. The company will provide the advisory, engineering, procurement and construction supervision services required for the realisation of the plant. This collaboration is an important step in the demonstration of the technology and for its potential future commercialisation.
For implementation at large-scale, operators must first to gain insights into operational conditions, said Jean-Claude Lumaret, CEO of Carbios. The collaboration with TechnipFMC and Carbios’ decision to build a demonstration plant, aims to address this need.
The collaboration ‘recognizes our technological know-how and leading-edge approach to commercialising new processes, as well as underlining our ambition to provide services in the field of sustainability and the circular economy’, according to Alain Francois, managing director of TechnipFMC’s Lyon office.
The technology developed by Carbios uses proprietary enzymes to depolymerise waste PET -polyethylene terephthalate -plastics back into the original monomers. These monomers can then be polymerised into a PET material that exhibits the same technical and physical properties as virgin PET.
All PET-based plastics, whether transparent, coloured, opaque, complex, or whatever, are suitable for the enzymatic recycling process developed. Hence this new plant will, like the pilot plant that is already up and running, accept PET-based waste of all kinds, from bottles to fibres.