AI helps turn highschool project into world saving tech which promises to devour 150 tons of fast-fashion plastic each year

I’m a big fan of both weird cool tech and environmental conservation. These might sound like opposing ideas, but we deeply need more of both, especially if they’re working together. In one of my favourite examples this week, a UK startup is working to make plastic eating enzymes to help deal with fast fashion.

TechCrunch recently profiled Epoch Biodesign, a company that’s been working to take founder Jacob Nathan’s highschool project worldwide. The startup has just received $18.3 million in Series A funding to graduate these plastic eating enzymes and hopefully send them off into the workforce. The funds are going to upscale and with the help of AI increase the production of the already developed enzymes. Epoch is forecasting to double in staff size this year, and have the first production run at commercial scale by 2028.

But let’s get back to those enzymes. For the unfamiliar, enzymes are the converters of biology. They’re proteins that act as a catalyst for chemical reactions, and they tend to be highly specialised. Often those chemical reactions would be much slower, or may not happen at all without the assistance of an enzyme. Enzymes exist naturally, and you use them every day. There’s Amylase, for example, which is an enzyme in your saliva which helps you break down starches into sugars to digest. You’re full of enzymes, they’re in the room with you, eating your food.

There are naturally forming enzymes that break down plastics, but they’re not exactly equipped for the amount we’ve created. They can only do certain types of plastic, and are typically very slow. Epoch Biodesign has built off this and used technology to find and develop better catalysts to break apart plastic waste much faster than what nature can offer.

Biology in general is very complex, containing large data strings and many potential variables. This is a perfect use case for AI, where large language models that are able to sort through this kind of data much faster than humans can. This has allowed Epoch Biodesign to sort through incomprehensible variations and come out with the select few that can actually achieve the task at hand, and even refine it from there. It’s fast skipping through evolution, and is allowing for some pretty incredible discoveries.

The biorecycling Epoch is working on has a few other advantages. Firstly it’s very high yield, with under 10% of the recycled material wasted. Thanks to the use of enzymes there aren’t any unwanted byproducts, and they can even be used to scrub some plastics of undesirable chemicals. Plus the team’s current method doesn’t require the heat in many other recycling methods making it cheaper and more energy efficient.

If all goes well we should start to see Epoch’s enzymes eating up polyester and two types of nylon soon. The team at Epoch Biodesign has been at work transferring and upscaling to their first production facility this year. Once in full swing, Nathan expects the hungry enzymes inside to devour around 150 tons of fast fashion plastics each year. Juicy.