Ultra-fast development of biocatalysts for textile recycling

全球每年为纺织和时装业生产约1.1亿吨合成纤维，但纺织产品的寿命要么被降级为较低等级的材料(碎布、地毯、绝缘材料等)，要么被送往垃圾填埋场或焚烧。纺织工业中使用的聚合物目前都没有回收成纤维(用于棉花的纤维对纤维回收不到1%)。Evoralis是剑桥大学的一家早期初创公司，其使命是实现真正和可持续的合成聚合物的解聚和回收。它使用基于微流控技术的独特的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、提纯和重复使用，以制造用于处女级材料的新纤维。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，发现塑料降解酶的速度比使用任何其他现有筛选方法的速度快1000倍。该项目将实施这项技术，以识别和优化能够以更高的效率和更强的健壮性解聚尼龙6的酶。这些酶将在时尚业提供的纺织品上进行测试，在小规模的纺织品回收生物过程中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.