Carbios is a French company, founded in 2011 and listed on Euronext, Growth Paris, with €430M market cap (Jun-21) and c40 employees. It has developed an enyzmatic process to recycle 90% of PET within 10-hours, which has been described in Nature.
“This highly efficient, optimized enzyme outperforms all PET hydrolases reported so far”. This has attracted partnerships with Nestle and PepsiCo. In November-2020, Carbios produced the first clear bottles containing 100% recycled PTA from textile waste, without downcycling, at lab scale.
The first full-scale plant will produce 40kTpa, costing €100M to construct, starting up in 2025, and saving 48kTpa of CO2. We believe economics could be extremely exciting, compared to conventional plastics and ethane cracking.
There are four challenges, based on our review, outlined in the data-file, and hard to de-risk from our analysis of Carbios’s patents. These challenges may therefore be worth exploring with the company.