Carbios signs a €7 million strategic collaboration with INRA

15-Apr-2013 - France

Carbios, a green chemistry company that specializes in innovative biological and industrial processes for recovering plastic waste and is developing competitive production processes for biosourced plastics and biopolymers, announced the signature of a pivotal €7-million collaboration with the French National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA) at the Toulouse White Biotechnology (TWB) research center. The project is part of the THANAPLAST™ private-public consortium on plastics lead by Carbios and that brings together CARBIOS' different corporate and academic partners.

The Carbios-INRA project will focus on the development of innovative bioprocesses for recovering plastic waste and producing biopolymers.

Carbios and INRA are both members of the TWB research center and will share know-how, expertise and human & technical resources over a five-year period. The goal is to develop effective biobased industrial processes that (as an alternative to conventional chemistry) add value to plastic waste and enable the production of economically competitive biosourced polymers.

A previously unknown bacterial enzyme makes new type of biodegradable polymer

Read news

The multidisciplinary collaboration will include R&D staff from TWB, the 3BCar Carnot Institute and two INRA groups. The INRA groups will focus on enzyme screening, enzymatic catalysis and cell engineering.

This project will enable Carbios to better address environmental, societal and economic issues concerning the recovery of plastic waste. Intensive exploitation of plastics means that over 100 million tons of plastic waste is generated worldwide every year. This alarming environmental issue has prompted a collective awareness of the need to find alternative production and consumption paradigms for a sustainable, environmentally responsible future.