The enzymes turning old bottles into brand new ones
Ordinary plastic recycling has a catch: each time a bottle is melted down it grows a little weaker, until it can no longer be reused and ends its life as waste. A French company called Carbios is taking a different route, borrowing a trick from nature. They use specially made enzymes, the same kind of tiny biological tools that break down fallen leaves on a forest floor, to gently unpick plastic back into its original building blocks.
From those building blocks, brand new bottles can be made, as good as the first, over and over. It turns what was a one way trip to landfill into a genuine circle. Nature has spent millions of years learning how to break things down and begin again, and here that quiet patience is being put to work on one of our most stubborn wastes.