How a teenager’s nylon-recycling dream became a lucrative reality

Like many teenagers, at 18, Jacob Nathan didn’t know what he wanted to do with his life. He had a passion for the environment and spent his teenage years protesting outside Parliament — sometimes skipping lessons to do so. “Maybe the planet thanked me for it. I don’t think my maths grades did,” he jokes. A secondary school project at the American School in London involved hunting for microbes that could break down plastic. He found bacteria capable of living off plastic as their only food source and reckoned there might be a business in it. He spent his gap year deciding on a plan. It turned into a London-based company with big ambitions to make our clothing industry more circular.One of the world’s thorniest waste problems is what to do with the clothes and the plastics within them that can’t easily be recycled. Nathan’s company, Epoch Biodesign, founded in 2019, could have the answer. Epoch employs 54 people in London and 58 in Spain. It’s backed by the likes of Inditex , owner of Zara, and sportswear brand Lululemon, and has raised more than £37.2 million. “Maybe the planet thanked me for skipping school to protest — I don’t think my maths grades did”Despite his parents thinking Nathan’s gap year was a diversion before he went to university (he decided to decline his place at University of Chicago to study biochemistry and economics), it’s become a full-time business. The firm’s research operation is in an underground facility beneath an office building at 10 Finsbury Square, near Moorgate station. Nathan calls London “an awesome place to be building the business”, pointing to its strong investors and ability to attract global talent. And that talented team is busy developing enzymes — proteins that super charge the speed of chemical reactions — which are capable of breaking nylon back into its constituent parts, which can then be used to manufacture new nylon.Their first target is nylon 66, a plastic found in everything from sportswear to car airbags. It’s cheap, which means it’s widely used — but it’s notoriously tricky to recover from the blended fabrics many of us use. As a result materials made from nylon 66 end up in the scrap heap or within incinerators. Epoch Biodesign, Nathan’s business, has been backed by Inditex , owner of Zara, and sportswear brand LululemonAFP/GettyBut Epoch thinks it can figure out how to recycle the material safely. AI plays a big role. Enzymes are made through a chain of amino acids interacting, so changing what’s in that chain alters what the enzyme can do. Tinkering with the amino acid “recipe” can alter the behaviour of the enzyme you end up with, but the different options are practically limitless. Epoch uses AI models to understand patterns in protein sequences and suggests promising candidates to be tested in the firm’s London labs.Epoch is already processing “tonnes” of waste in London, but it plans to go much further. In July, it acquired a shuttered chemicals plant near Girona in Spain as part of its plan to scale its enzymatic plastic recycling technology. A separate facility in North Acton will test the firm’s recycling production on a bigger scale.Epoch hopes to have a full-scale commercial recycling facility somewhere in Europe by 2030, which will turn waste nylon into new ingredients that can be reused. So far, the recycling process isn’t yet cost-competitive compared to making nylon from fossil fuels. But as production scales up and AI advances further, that could change - and at a time when oil prices are yo-yoing, Nathan claims his method is more reliable when it comes to cost.Nathan reckons the same approach being tested near Moorgate could eventually be used to tackle other plastics beyond nylon 66. “We want all nylon 66 to be Epoch-recycled nylon 66,” he says. “We think this is the better path forward.”