Ask someone how plastic gets recycled, and most people picture one thing: melting it down and reshaping it. That’s actually only one of several bioplastics recycling methods in active use today. A bioplastic might go through mechanical processing, chemical breakdown, or even biological treatment using enzymes. It depends on the material, the contamination level, and the value chain it comes from. MoeBIOS works across all three. We apply different combinations to our packaging, textile, and agricultural value chains.
Here’s what actually separates them, and why no single method covers every case.
Mechanical recycling: reshaping without changing the chemistry
Mechanical recycling is exactly what it sounds like. Workers shred, wash, separate, and re-melt the plastic without altering its underlying chemical structure. The polymer itself stays the same.
This is the most mature and generally lowest-cost recycling route. However, it depends heavily on how clean the input material is. In MoeBIOS’s packaging value chain, this means a pre-treatment stage first. Workers shred, wash and separate the material by density, validated at industrial volume. A decontamination step follows, using supercritical CO2 technology, before the material is clean enough for reuse.
For textiles, mechanical recycling looks different again. Workers shred waste fabric, then feed it through a machine that mechanically tears it apart into individual fibres. They can then respin these fibres into new yarn. For agricultural bioplastics, mechanical recycling only happens after a dedicated decontamination pretreatment. This step removes foreign plastics, fillers, and additives first, since agricultural waste tends to arrive far more mixed and contaminated than packaging waste.
The trade-off: repeated mechanical processing gradually degrades a polymer’s mechanical properties. That’s why not every stream can go through this route indefinitely.
Chemical recycling: breaking it down to rebuild it
Chemical recycling takes a different approach entirely. Instead of reshaping the plastic, it breaks the polymer down to its monomer or oligomer building blocks, chemically. Manufacturers can then repolymerize these building blocks into new, virgin-equivalent material.
For PLA specifically, the main chemical recycling methods are hydrolysis (breaking the polymer down in water, with a catalyst) and alcoholysis. A peer-reviewed review of PLA chemical recycling confirms these as the two most established routes. Both typically require high temperatures and either strongly acidic or basic conditions to work efficiently.
That’s precisely why chemical recycling is harder to scale than it sounds. It takes considerable energy to run, and conventional processes often rely on heavy-metal catalysts that raise both environmental and cost concerns. MoeBIOS’s specific contribution here is developing new heterogeneous catalysts. The goal: make the process both cleaner and more economically viable. We’re also adapting existing methods to the messier, mixed waste streams MoeBIOS actually works with, rather than the highly pure streams most chemical recycling research assumes.
Biological recycling: letting enzymes do the work
The newest and least mature of the three routes uses biological agents, specifically engineered enzymes, to break down the polymer. This happens under much gentler conditions than chemical recycling requires. Research on microbial enzyme biotechnology for plastic circularity notes that enzymatic tools can depolymerize plastics into reusable building blocks. However, their real-world contribution still depends heavily on how they fit into existing waste management practices.
Enzymatic recycling of bioplastics specifically is still at a very early stage. It’s slow. Unlike chemical recycling, researchers can’t simply add more heat to speed up the reaction, since that would destroy the enzymes doing the work. MoeBIOS is developing thermostable enzymes designed to stay stable and effective even as temperatures rise. The aim is to make the process viable at an affordable industrial scale. Notably, this is the one recycling route MoeBIOS applies identically across all three value chains: packaging, textiles, and agriculture alike.
Why MoeBIOS uses all three
None of these three bioplastics recycling methods is simply “better” than the others. Each one suits a different situation: how contaminated the input material is, how pure a final output needs to be, and what the resulting material will be used for.
That’s really the point. MoeBIOS’s own work across packaging, textiles, and agriculture shows this clearly. Closing the loop on bioplastics waste rarely comes down to one single fix. It comes down to matching the right method to the right material. It also requires building the sorting and decontamination infrastructure needed to make that matching possible in the first place, a challenge we’ve covered in more detail in our piece on why bioplastics contaminate recycling streams.
Where this fits in MoeBIOS
This work sits within MoeBIOS’s Work Package 2, which covers the technical recycling development across all three value chains. Some of the figures MoeBIOS is targeting, like polymer recovery rates and enzymatic degradation efficiency, remain project goals still under validation, not final results. We’ll share progress as testing continues.