EUROPEAN CONGRESS AND EXHIBITION ON ADVANCED MATERIALS AND PROCESSES - EUROMAT 2021

Due to environmental, economic and regulatory aspects there is a strong need for novel strategies allowing environmentally friendly recycling of plastics and textiles. Enzymes have shown high potential especially for the step-wise recovery of building blocks from blended materials. We will show that enzymes can specifically hydrolyze and solubilize certain components of blended textiles or from packaging materials. Thereby, building blocks and/or polymers (e.g. fibres) can be recovered in pure form and reused for production of materials. Various examples for textiles and plastics will be presented. Despite the high potential of biocatalysts for this purpose, yet more efficient enzymes are required for economic industrial implementation. Hence, we will demonstrate how enzyme discovery, design and engineering can lead to more powerful tools for material recycling.