Carbios' Biotech Deals Signal a Tipping Point for Plastic Recycling

CLERMONT-FERRAND, FRANCE – November 24, 2025 – In a move that sends a powerful signal across the packaging and manufacturing industries, French biotechnology firm Carbios has secured two multi-year commercial agreements with undisclosed heavyweights in the beverage sector. The deals, announced today, are for the supply of high-quality recycled PET (r-PET) produced through the company’s groundbreaking enzymatic biorecycling process. This marks not only a strategic entry into the massive beverage market but also a critical commercial validation for a technology that promises to fundamentally disrupt the lifecycle of plastic.

These agreements are more than just another sales contract; they represent a tangible step toward solving one of the world's most persistent material challenges. By successfully turning complex plastic waste back into food-grade raw material, Carbios is moving from a promising concept to a commercially viable reality. The news also provides a significant boost to the firm’s long-term industrial ambitions, directly impacting the financing and construction of its first-of-a-kind biorecycling plant in Longlaville, France.

As Vincent Kamel, CEO of CARBIOS, stated, “These new agreements confirm the robustness of our technology and the attractiveness of our offer for strategic sectors such as beverages. They also comfort our strategy of sector diversification.”

The Enzymatic Revolution

For decades, the world has grappled with the limitations of traditional plastic recycling. Mechanical recycling, the most common method, often results in “downcycling”—turning a clear plastic bottle into a lower-grade product like carpeting or clothing fiber. This process struggles with colored, opaque, and multi-layered PET plastics, much of which ends up in landfills or incinerators. The material quality degrades with each cycle, making a truly circular economy for plastics an elusive goal.

Carbios offers a radically different approach. Inspired by nature, its proprietary process uses a specially developed enzyme to deconstruct PET plastic waste—including bottles, packaging, and polyester textiles—back into its core chemical building blocks: terephthalic acid (PTA) and monoethylene glycol (MEG). Once purified, these monomers are indistinguishable from their fossil-fuel-derived counterparts and can be used to create brand-new, virgin-quality PET.

This biological process elegantly sidesteps the shortcomings of mechanical methods. It can handle complex waste streams that are currently unrecyclable, and because it restores the material to its original molecular state, the resulting r-PET can be recycled infinitely without any loss of quality. The environmental implications are profound. Independent analysis shows that Carbios's method reduces CO2 emissions by 57% compared to the production of virgin plastic from oil and gas. For every ton of PET biorecycled, the process avoids the use of 1.3 tons of petroleum, all while operating at low temperatures and without harsh solvents.

From Lab to Longlaville: The High-Stakes Path to Scale

While the technology has been proven at its industrial demonstration plant since 2021, the true test lies in scaling up to meet global demand. The centerpiece of this strategy is the planned industrial facility in Longlaville, a joint venture with Indorama Ventures, a global leader in PET production. The plant is designed to process 50,000 tonnes of post-consumer PET waste annually—equivalent to roughly 2 billion plastic bottles.

However, the path to industrialization has faced financial headwinds. Construction of the plant, initially slated for an earlier start, was paused pending the arrangement of additional financing. Today’s announcement is a crucial piece of that puzzle. The new beverage contracts bring Carbios’s pre-sold capacity to approximately 50% of the Longlaville plant’s maximum output.

This milestone is pivotal, as the company is actively negotiating with other potential partners to reach a 70% pre-commercialization threshold. Hitting this target is a key condition for unlocking the final tranche of non-dilutive funding required to resume construction, which is now anticipated before the end of 2025, with plant commissioning projected for the second half of 2027. The project has already secured €42.5 million in public grants from the French government and the Grand-Est Region, underscoring its strategic importance to Europe's circular economy ambitions.

A Market Thirsty for Sustainable Solutions

The timing for Carbios's scale-up could not be better. The demand for high-quality, food-grade r-PET is surging, driven by a combination of consumer pressure and stringent regulations. The European Union, for instance, has mandated that single-use plastic beverage bottles contain at least 25% recycled content by 2025, a figure that rises to 30% by 2030. These targets have sent consumer goods giants scrambling to secure a reliable supply of r-PET, a material that remains scarce in the required quality.

This regulatory push has created a powerful market pull for advanced recycling technologies like Carbios's. The company is already a central player in two major industry consortiums, one for packaging—with founding members L'Oréal, Nestlé Waters, PepsiCo, and Suntory Beverage & Food Europe—and another for textiles, including brands like Patagonia, PUMA, and Salomon. These long-standing partnerships have laid the groundwork for industry-wide adoption.

Of course, Carbios is not operating in a vacuum. The advanced recycling space is becoming increasingly competitive, with companies like Ioniqa Technologies, Revalyu Recycling, and Birch Biosciences developing their own chemical and biological solutions. Yet, Carbios's specific enzymatic approach and its significant progress toward full-scale industrialization, now bolstered by major commercial contracts, position it as a formidable leader in the race to close the loop on PET plastics. This technology isn't just about better recycling; it's about creating a resilient, less-polluting, and economically viable supply chain for one of the world's most ubiquitous materials.