IN Brief:
- Credit committee approvals have been secured from a majority of lenders to the Longlaville project.
- A beverage-sector agreement under finalisation is expected to raise pre-sales to 60% of nominal plant capacity.
- The 50,000-tonne annual PET biorecycling project still requires completion of its wider financing package before construction resumes.
Carbios has moved its planned Longlaville PET biorecycling plant further through the financing process, securing credit committee approvals from a majority of project lenders while a new beverage sector agreement is expected to raise pre-sales to 60% of nominal capacity.
The company said due diligence by export credit agencies and equity partners remains under way. Construction cannot resume until the wider financing package is completed, leaving financial close as the next decisive step for a project intended to provide Carbios with its first commercial scale reference plant.
Longlaville is designed to process 50,000 tonnes of prepared PET waste each year using Carbios’ enzymatic depolymerisation technology. The process breaks PET back into its constituent monomers before repolymerisation, allowing material from packaging and textile streams to be returned to PET production rather than restricted to lower value applications.
The project occupies a 13.7 hectare site in eastern France and is designed around four 300m³ reactors. Carbios has previously put construction cost at about €230 million before commissioning expenditure, making the plant a significant test of whether an enzymatic recycling route can move from demonstration scale into continuous industrial operation with acceptable economics.
Commercial commitments are advancing alongside the financing work. Carbios said an agreement being finalised with a major beverage company should take pre-sales to 60% of the plant’s nominal capacity. The company has also validated its fibre to fibre biorecycling process, widening the potential customer base beyond packaging and strengthening the case for a plant intended to accept PET waste that can be difficult to recover through conventional routes.
Those commitments reduce part of the demand risk attached to a first commercial plant, but they do not remove the delivery challenge. Longlaville still has to demonstrate stable feedstock supply, reliable depolymerisation, product quality, energy and utility performance, and sufficient throughput to support the cost structure assumed by lenders and customers.
Benoît Grenot, chief executive of Carbios, said the company’s immediate priority is to “finalize this financing and resume construction of the Longlaville plant”. The project has moved through demonstration work and established commercial interest; the remaining constraint is converting a complex financing structure into funded construction.
The plant also carries weight beyond its own output. Carbios has established Kaibio Biotechnology, a joint venture with Wankai New Materials, to develop a licensed industrial facility in China. Qualification work has confirmed that locally available feedstocks and waste streams can be processed using the Carbios system, extending the technology’s commercial route beyond direct ownership of Longlaville.
A working European reference plant would support both production revenue and licensing. Prolonged delay, by contrast, would leave potential licensees and customers assessing the technology without a full scale plant operating as proof of industrial performance.
Carbios reported €48 million in cash at 30 June 2026 and said this was sufficient to cover more than 12 months of group operating expenses. First half operating expenditure fell 19% year on year as the company tightened spending. Those figures improve corporate headroom, although Longlaville depends on a separate combination of project lending, public support and external equity rather than being funded from group cash alone.
The technical proposition addresses a persistent problem in PET recycling. Mechanical recycling is already established for relatively clean bottle streams, but colour, multilayer structures, contamination, degradation and textile content can reduce the quality or value of recovered material. Depolymerisation offers a different route by returning suitable PET waste to chemical building blocks, with the aim of producing material capable of meeting demanding packaging and textile specifications again.
The engineering burden rises sharply at commercial scale. Waste preparation has to deliver a consistent feed to the reactors, enzymes must perform across industrial volumes, separation and purification stages must maintain quality, and the recovered monomers have to meet specifications for subsequent polymer production. Plant availability and maintenance also become more important once contracted customers are relying on regular output rather than demonstration batches.
Longlaville is approaching the point where those questions can only be answered through construction and operation. Lender approvals and higher pre-sales make the financing case more developed than it was earlier in the year, but neither represents financial close. Export credit and equity reviews remain open, and Carbios has not announced a revised completion or production date.
The next material milestone is completion of the capital structure needed to put contractors back on site and move Longlaville from a financed proposition towards an operating recycling plant.
