Albany International and Cyclezyme advance enzyme recycling for industrial textiles

Albany International and Cyclezyme say their enzyme-based process has successfully depolymerized selected industrial textile samples made primarily of polyester and polyamide, better known as nylon. The companies said on June 11, 2026, that they are now refining analytical methods to measure enzyme activity and push the technology further toward recycling technical textiles and other high-performance industrial materials.

The work lands in a stubborn corner of the sustainability market: industrial textiles built for durability, not easy reuse. Albany says these materials run through papermaking, construction materials, process industries, logistics and advanced manufacturing, where the fabric has to perform under stress and often resists the recycling routes that handle simpler waste streams. That is why the focus on polyester and nylon matters. Those fibers are the backbone of a huge amount of technical textile use, but they are also the ones most likely to frustrate conventional recycling when they are blended, contaminated or engineered for long service life.

Albany International, headquartered in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, was founded in 1895 and today describes its Machine Clothing business as a major supplier of fabrics and belts for paper and nonwovens production. In that context, the collaboration with Cyclezyme is more than a laboratory exercise. It is a test of whether one of the most demanding categories of industrial fabric can be brought into a circular system without sacrificing the performance that made it valuable in the first place. Merle Stein, president of Machine Clothing at Albany International, said recycling capability is important to customers and framed the results as evidence that circularity may be possible in advanced textiles, including paper machine clothing.

Cyclezyme, a Swedish biotechnology company focused on scaling tailored enzymes for plastic and textile waste streams, said it has produced several nylon-degrading enzymes as part of the work. Peter Falck, the company’s chief executive, said the results strengthen its view that enzymatic recycling can become an important solution for more advanced textiles and industrial materials. The companies have already begun discussions on the next phase, which will look at scaling and future industrial applications.

That next phase is where the commercial test begins. The open questions are the ones that decide whether this stays a promising lab result or becomes a working recycling pathway: which feedstocks can go in, how much material can be recovered, how contamination changes the yield, and what scale-up milestones have to be met before industrial buyers can treat enzyme depolymerisation as a real supply-chain option.