French biotech company, Carbios has postponed the commissioning of its first industrial biorecycling plant in Longlaville, in France’s Meurthe-et-Moselle region, citing a difficult economic environment that continues to complicate financing.
Originally scheduled to be commissioned in 2025, the project has now been delayed again, with the French biotechnology company announcing that it has extended its timetable. Carbios said it is allowing itself until the end of the first quarter of 2026 to secure the final tranche of private funding required to begin construction. As a result, the plant is now expected to become operational in the first half of 2028, around three years later than initially planned.
The Longlaville facility is intended to industrialise Carbios’s enzymatic depolymerisation technology for recycling PET (polyethylene terephthalate) plastics. Once operational, the plant is designed to process the equivalent of 300 million T-shirts, at least 90 per cent of which are made from synthetic materials, or around two billion coloured bottles, converting them into virgin-quality PET.
The project has secured US $ 50 million in public funding, and pre-commercialisation contracts already cover close to half of the site’s future production capacity. However, a remaining portion of private financing is still required, a process the company said has been slowed by investor caution towards first-of-a-kind industrial infrastructure projects in the current market.
A consortium of companies including L’Oréal, On, Patagonia, Puma, PVH Corp and Salomon is supporting the Carbios project, with plans to use the recycled materials for bottles and textile fibres. Following an initial delay announced at the end of 2024, Carbios also introduced spending reductions in spring 2025.
While progress on its French project has slowed, the company is accelerating its ‘asset-light’ strategy by licensing its technology internationally. Rather than relying solely on the Longlaville site to demonstrate its process, Carbios is working with industrial partners capable of financing and operating their own facilities.
After signing an agreement with China’s Wankai Group in early December for a plant in China, Carbios is now targeting further deployments in Europe, North America and South America. In 2024, the company announced additional projects to replicate its industrial model with partners in China, Turkey and the UK.
