French specialist for chemical recycling Carbios (Saint-Beauzire; www.carbios.com/en) and Landbell (Mainz, Germany; www.landbell.de/en) have announced plans to collaborate. As part of a procurement agreement, the German waste disposal service provider is to supply Carbios with 15,000 t/y of PET granulate from 2026.

Carbios said it plans to build a chemical PET reclaim plant in Longlaville, France, by the end of 2025, which is to have a processing capacity of up to 50,000 t/y of base material in the final expansion stage. Carbios’s enzymatic recycling process, which reportedly uses less water and energy compared with current standard recycling methods, breaks down polymers into monomers that can be reprocessed into virgin-quality PET after a subsequent separation and purification process. 

Carbios CEO Emmanuel Ladent said the current partnership with Landbell, a further procurement agreement with French packaging take-back system Citeo (Paris; www.citeo.com), and a letter of intent with Indorama Ventures (IVL, Bangkok, Thailand; www.indoramaventures.com) would altogether allow Carbios to cover more than 70% of its base material requirements for its first commercial plant at the tripoint of France, Belgium, and Luxembourg.

“PET trays are […] widely used for food packaging. However, they are currently posing challenges for mechanical recycling, especially those with a multi-layered structure”, explains Uwe Echteler, Landbell COO. The depolymerisation process makes it easier to recycle this scrap material.