Advanced Materials Based on Plastic-Eating Enzymes (II): The enzymatic arsenal and its current limits
The paradigm shift turned enzymatic recycling into a materials engineering problem. To this day we have not fully solved it: very few enzymes are applicable under industrial plant conditions.
I have written the second chapter of this series to explain where we stand. What enzymes we have and where they came from. What is being achieved through protein engineering. What facilities are already operating at industrial scale. And what continues to hold back implementation — which is where my thesis begins.
In the next chapter we will look at what strategies can be pursued to improve enzyme efficiency as catalysts and move closer to those industrial conditions.
Advanced Materials Based on Plastic-Eating Enzymes (I): Recycling Challenges in Spain.
Spain's municipal recycling rate hit 43.2% in 2022 and dropped to 41.4% in 2023 — well short of the EU's 55% target for 2025. In July 2026, the European Commission issued a reasoned opinion for non-compliance, the last step before the EU Court of Justice.
The problem isn't effort — it's physics. Plastics are chemically inert, multilayered, and increasingly complex. Mechanical recycling degrades quality with each cycle. Chemical recycling demands extreme temperatures. Incineration destroys the material forever. Natural biodegradation takes centuries.
A fifth pathway is emerging: enzymatic degradation. Since the 2016 discovery of Ideonella sakaiensis — a bacterium with enzymes that break PET into its original monomers at room temperature — researchers have been isolating, optimizing, and scaling those enzymes as industrial catalysts. Carbios already runs a demonstration plant in France that depolymerizes 100,000 bottles in under 16 hours.
But challenges remain: current enzymes only work on polyesters (5.3% of European plastic waste), proteins denature at high temperatures, and the reaction is limited to the plastic's surface. These are materials engineering problems — and that's exactly where this PhD thesis picks up.
Anatomy of a wine (CSI: RIOJA)
I’ve written an article where I break down, compound by compound, what’s really inside your glass. After reading it, you won’t be able to drink a glass of wine without putting it on trial.