The French biorecycling provider Carbios has signed an agreement with On, Patagonia, Puma and Salomon to develop solutions aiming to enhance the recyclability and circularity of the brands’ products. The consortium wants to speed up the introduction of Carbios’ biorecycling technology and research how entire products can be recycled easier, work out solutions to take back worn polyester items, including sorting and dismantling technologies and gather data on fiber-to-fiber recycling as well as circularity models.
Currently, the four brands see that conventional recycling technologies (like bottle-to-fiber recycling) can only be a smaller part of the solutions needed to meet their sustainability goals, as future regulations will require more circularity in packaging and textile. In addition, PET bottles are forecast to become scarce as they are used for circular production processes in the food and beverage industry.
Carbios’ process constitutes the biorecycling of polyester (PET) fibers on their own or together with other fibers by using an enzyme capable of selectively extracting the polyester, recovering it to recreate a virgin fiber. According to Carbios, the technology makes it possible to recover the PET polyester present in all textile waste that cannot be recycled using traditional technologies.
