On, Patagonia, Puma, and Salomon have signed an agreement with Carbios, a French end-of-life plastics recycling company, to develop solutions to enhance the recyclability and circularity of their products.
A critical component of the two-year deal is to speed up the introduction of Carbios’ bio-recycling technology.
Carbios, with each of the companies, is also tasked to research how products can be recycled, develop solutions to take back used polyester products, sort and dismantle technologies used to create the products, and gather data on fiber-to-fiber recycling and circularity models.
The challenge the four brands share is that their sustainable development goals can only be met partially by traditional recycling technologies, which mainly target bottle-to-fiber recycling.
Future regulations will require more circularity in packaging and textile production; however, the market consensus is that there could soon be a shortage of PET bottles used for circular production methods developed by the Food & Beverage Industry.
Carbios’ biorecycling process uses an enzyme that selectively extracts polyester to extrude a virgin fiber making it possible to recover PET polyester in textile waste that cannot be recycled using traditional technologies.
Emmanuel Ladent, CEO, Carbios, said, “This Consortium model has proved to be very efficient based on the success of the milestones previously achieved in packaging. We are very pleased to partner with these prestigious brands, On, Patagonia, Puma, and Salomon. Our common goal is to reduce the textile industry’s environmental impact by offering an industrial solution to recycle polyester fibers and help our partners meet their sustainable development goals.”
