Carbios and its Fiber-to-Fiber Consortium have completed an industrial manufacturing trial converting complex textile and plastic waste into recycled polyester garments using established production lines across Europe.
The programme produced more than one tonne of recycled PET, marketed as EnzyTex, before processing the material through polymerisation, yarn manufacture, knitting, dyeing, and garment production. Consortium members Patagonia, PUMA, and Salomon participated in the work, which was intended to test whether polyester recovered through Carbios’s enzymatic process could pass through a conventional textile manufacturing chain.
The feedstock included textile waste and complex plastic streams that are difficult to handle through conventional mechanical recycling. Carbios uses enzymatic depolymerisation to break PET into its constituent building blocks before those monomers are purified and used to make new polymer.
That differs from mechanical recycling, where polymer is repeatedly melted and reprocessed. Mechanical routes can work effectively with suitable feedstock, but contamination, mixed fibres, dyes, coatings, and repeated thermal processing can restrict the quality and applications available from the recovered material.
Carbios’s process instead targets the PET fraction chemically through enzymes. The recovered monomers can then be separated from non-PET material and purified before repolymerisation, providing a possible route for waste streams that contain cotton, elastane, colourants, or other substances alongside polyester.
For the latest trial, Selenis in Portugal repolymerised the recovered material to produce more than one tonne of EnzyTex r-PET. ANTEX then converted the polymer into yarn on industrial production equipment in Spain before Henitex knitted the yarn into interlock fabric in France.
TAD carried out the dyeing stage using an industrial bath, after which ToptexCube, part of Chamatex Group, produced the finished garments. Carbios says each stage was completed under standard industrial operating conditions rather than through specially created laboratory equipment.
That distinction is important because laboratory recyclability does not automatically produce a usable industrial raw material. Polymer viscosity, melt behaviour, spinning stability, fibre strength, dye response, and dimensional performance can all become limiting factors once material enters high-speed production machinery designed around consistent feedstock.
Carbios reports that the recycled polyester delivered mechanical strength, dyeability, and colour fastness comparable with virgin polyester during the programme. It also says manufacturers were able to process the material without changing normal operating conditions, reducing the need for separate downstream manufacturing infrastructure.
The trial follows three years of work through the Fiber-to-Fiber Consortium. Earlier activity demonstrated garments made entirely from polyester recovered from textile waste, establishing that discarded fabric could be taken back to polymer and then returned to clothing. The latest stage places greater emphasis on volume and integration across several European factories.
Polyester presents a substantial recycling challenge because the characteristics that make it useful in textiles also complicate its recovery. Clothing frequently combines polyester with cotton, elastane, coatings, printing, and chemical treatments, while products collected at end of life vary widely in composition and condition.
Mechanical recycling has consequently relied heavily on comparatively clean PET streams, including bottles, for production of recycled polyester fibre. That can displace virgin material but does not create a closed textile loop because the raw material originates outside the clothing system.
Moving discarded textiles back into new textiles requires collection and sorting systems capable of identifying suitable material before the recycling technology itself can operate. Carbios’s enzymatic process addresses the polymer separation stage, but industrial adoption will also depend on sufficient feedstock being aggregated economically and delivered to recycling plants at consistent quality.
Scale remains the larger commercial test. More than one tonne is sufficient to run repeated industrial textile processes and demonstrate compatibility, but global polyester consumption is measured in tens of millions of tonnes. Recycling plants will need substantially greater throughput before enzymatic recovery can supply more than a small share of that market.
Carbios has already been testing the process under conditions representative of industrial operation at its demonstration plant, where it reported completing its 100th batch earlier this year. The company is using that work to extend its technology licensing proposition from PET packaging into the textile market.
The latest consortium trial addresses a different part of the scale-up problem: whether recycled polymer emerging from the process behaves predictably once it reaches conventional manufacturers. That is a critical requirement because replacing the recycling stage is considerably easier than replacing polymerisation, spinning, knitting, dyeing, and garment equipment throughout the textile industry.
The result therefore establishes compatibility rather than mass-market availability. Carbios has shown more than one tonne of recycled material moving from difficult waste through a European industrial textile chain without requiring a dedicated manufacturing route. Commercial deployment now depends on pushing the recycling stage itself towards the volumes, cost, and feedstock reliability needed to make that material routine rather than exceptional.
