Ultra-fast development of biocatalysts for textile recycling

全球每年为纺织和时尚行业生产约1.1亿吨合成纤维，但纺织品的使用寿命结束后，要么被降级为低级材料（破布、地毯、绝缘材料等），要么被送往垃圾填埋场或焚烧。目前，纺织工业中使用的聚合物都没有被回收再利用成纤维（棉花的纤维对纤维回收利用率不到1%）。Evoralis是一家来自剑桥大学的早期创业公司，其使命是实现合成聚合物的真正和可持续的解聚和回收。它使用基于微流体技术的独特超高通量筛选平台来寻找和改进可以将塑料分解成其组成构件的生物催化剂。相应的单体可以回收，纯化和再利用，以制造新的纤维为原始级材料。使用这项技术，生物催化剂可以以前所未有的速度进行测试，使得发现塑料降解酶的速度比使用任何其他现有筛选方法快1000倍。该项目将采用这项技术来识别和优化酶，以更高的效率和更高的鲁棒性解聚尼龙6。这些酶将在时装行业提供的纺织品上进行小规模纺织品回收生物过程的测试，以选择性地从纺织品混合物中降解尼龙。

Around 110 million tonnes of synthetic fibres are produced worldwide each year for the textile and fashion industry, but the end-of-life for textile products is either downcycling into lower grade materials (rags, carpets, insulation materials, etc), being sent to landfill or incinerated. None of the polymers used in the textile industry are currently recycled back into fibres (less than 1% fibre-to-fibre recycling applied for cotton). Evoralis is an early-stage startup from the University of Cambridge with a mission to enable true and sustainable depolymerisation and recycling of synthetic polymers. It uses a unique ultrahigh-throughput screening platform based on a microfluidic technology to find and improve biocatalysts that can break down plastics into their constituent building-blocks. The corresponding monomers can be recovered, purified and re-used in making new fibres for virgin-grade materials. Using this technology, biocatalysts can be tested at unprecedented speed, making the discovery of plastic-degrading enzymes up to 1,000 times faster than using any other current screening method.The project will implement this technology to identify and optimise enzymes that can depolymerise nylon 6 with higher efficiency and increased robustness. These enzymes will be tested on textiles provided by the fashion industry in small-scale textile recycling bioprocesses to selectively degrade nylon out of a mixture of textiles.