Photo by Kathyryn Tripp on Unsplash (illustrative)
On 30 October 2025, a team led by researchers at Beijing University of Chemical Technology and the Chinese Academy of Sciences reported in the journal Science that they had found an enzyme able to break down polyurethane, one of the hardest plastics to recycle. They used an artificial-intelligence tool to screen enzyme candidates that could survive harsh industrial recycling conditions.
Key facts
The enzyme, called AbPURase, was identified with GRASE, a deep-learning framework based on graph neural networks.
It showed about two orders of magnitude more activity than previously known enzymes in the solvent used for industrial glycolysis recycling.
In tests with commercial polyurethane foam at kilogram scale, it achieved about 95% breakdown within eight hours; with more enzyme, depolymerization reached 98.6%.
Thermoset polyurethanes are hard to recycle because of their cross-linked structure, and today's main chemical recycling method, glycolysis, leaves much of the output as unusable waste.
Why it matters
Polyurethane is used in flexible foams such as those in running shoes, in furniture, cars, adhesives, coatings and insulation. An enzyme that works within existing chemical recycling processes could make it practical to recover its building blocks, at a time when only about 9% of plastics are recycled globally.
Worth noting
This is a laboratory and pilot-scale result, not an industrial plant. The authors say further protein engineering is needed, and turning the recovered chemicals back into new polyurethane still has to be demonstrated at scale.