What Became of Garbo's EIC Accelerator PET Chemical Recycling

Most PET that is recycled in Europe today is clear bottles, shredded, washed and melted down again. Coloured trays, opaque bottles, multilayer films and polyester textiles mostly end up burned or landfilled, because mechanical recycling cannot clean them to a usable grade. Garbo, a chemicals regeneration company in Cerano, near Novara in Piedmont, set out to change that with a chemical route: break the polymer back into its building block and make new PET from it.

In the 3 April 2019 cut-off of the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2, the forerunner of today's EIC Accelerator, the European Commission selected Garbo's ChemPET project, listed as "Industrial scale PET chemical recycling via an innovative glycolysis process" in the official list of winners. Garbo is the only company named for the project in that list. CORDIS records an EU contribution of €1,790,250 towards a total cost of €2,557,500, from 1 September 2019 to 30 September 2023. The promise was a plant producing 66 tonnes a day of BHET, the intermediate from which new PET is made. That plant was not built during the project. Seven years after the award, the first industrial plant is planned to start in early 2029.

Where Garbo Stands Now

Garbo is active. Its news page reports ISO 14001 certification in January 2026, ISO 45001 in February 2026, attendance at the Plastics Recycling Show Europe in Amsterdam in 2026 and the completion of new chemical storage capacity at Cerano in May 2026. Its main business is not PET recycling: the company describes itself as specialised in "the production, commercialization, and regeneration of materials", with product lines in chemicals, plastics and rubber, antifreeze and automotive fluids, and diamond powder. Its register entry lists the recovery and preparation of waste for recycling as its activity, according to CompanyReports.

The ChemPET technology now sits in a separate company. Chempet S.r.l., founded in 2020 at the same Cerano address, calls itself a joint venture between Saipem and Garbo on its website, and PETCORE Europe states that Garbo founded the company and that Saipem became a shareholder. The size of Saipem's stake is not public.

The Technology: Glycolysis Back to the Monomer

PET is made by joining terephthalic acid and ethylene glycol into long chains. Glycolysis runs this partly in reverse: PET waste is heated with ethylene glycol, which cuts the chains into BHET (bis-hydroxyethyl terephthalate), a small molecule that can be purified, crystallised and fed into a standard PET plant. Because dyes and contaminants are removed at the monomer stage, the output can in principle match virgin polymer, including for food contact. Garbo claims a simpler process that uses no flammable or hazardous substances and accepts a wider range of waste, according to Saipem's March 2023 announcement.

The trade-off is cost. Fragiacomo told CORDIS that chemical recycling "requires higher initial investment compared to traditional mechanical recycling", and that its strength lies in cheap, low-value feedstock such as opaque packaging, multilayer materials and textile waste. The ChemPET website lists coloured, multilayer and contaminated PET as well as polyester textiles among the inputs it can process. No independent test of the purity of Garbo's recycled PET has been published.

What the EIC Project Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

ChemPET was Garbo's second EU grant for the process. A Phase 1 feasibility study under the same name ran from June to August 2017 with €50,000, according to CORDIS. The Phase 2 project listed five objectives: demonstrate a plant able to produce 66 tonnes of BHET a day, prove the plant economics, show that BHET works as a commodity for different PET goods, improve by-product recovery, and build a stakeholder network to replicate the approach. Of the €1,790,250 EU contribution, €1,349,847.94 went to Garbo and €440,402.06 to Chempet S.r.l., which took part as a third party.

The final periodic report, covering September 2021 to September 2023, is frank about what went wrong. It says the pandemic and swings in energy, oil and waste prices forced Garbo to re-engineer the plant, and that the initial budget for building, commissioning and accepting the pilot plant "appeared totally underestimated". As a result, "the erection of large-scale pilot plant at GARBO premises in Cerano could not be completed within ChemPET Project duration". Garbo instead upgraded its existing pilot plant: it moved from batch to continuous operation, added continuous waste feeding, reached 6 tonnes of BHET a day and tested its own glycolysis reactor and crystallisation section.

The two CORDIS documents describe the 6-tonne figure differently. The report speaks of "6 tpd of BHET produced", while the February 2024 results article says the plant reached "six tonnes per day of waste PET feed in the reactor". Either way, it is about a tenth of the promised demonstration scale.

1. Demonstration plant at 66 t/day of BHETNot achievedNot built during the project; the CORDIS report says the budget was underestimated.
2. Continuous, scaled-up processDeliveredPilot moved from batch to continuous flow at 6 t/day, per the CORDIS report.
3. Plant economics for large-scale productionPartlyPlant redesigned as 66 t/day modules; no economics published.
4. BHET as a commodity for crPET goodsUnverifiedNo customer, product or test result named publicly.
5. Network to replicate the processDeliveredSaipem agreement, March 2023; report claims two licensing contracts, counterparties not named.

The report also says that on 1 March 2023 Ghirba, Garbo, Chempet and a "new 3rd investor" signed a binding investment agreement for a first industrial plant at Cerano, that two licensing contracts had been signed "with leading counterparties", and that Garbo and Chempet hold six national and international patents. The ChemPET website counts five proprietary patents, and the CORDIS results article five filed and one in preparation. Neither the third investor nor the licensees are named in any public source found.

What Happened After the Grant

The clearest result came from outside the project. On 15 March 2023 Saipem, the Milan-based engineering and construction group, announced an agreement with Garbo for "the industrialisation, development and international commercialisation" of ChemPET and for the construction at Cerano of what it called the first chemical plastic recycling plant in Italy, according to Saipem's press release. Garbo's chief executive Guido Fragiacomo spoke of "the immediate industrialisation of the two 22.5 kTA units in Cerano", or 45,000 tonnes a year. The deal was reported by Petnology and Process Worldwide.

"Immediate" proved optimistic. On 18 November 2025 Saipem announced that ReNova ChemPET, a project it leads with Garbo, had been selected for about €15.5 million from the EU Innovation Fund's 2024 call for net-zero technologies, one of 61 projects in 18 countries. The money is to be paid only after a grant agreement with the EU climate agency CINEA, which Saipem expected by March 2026. The plant is scheduled to start in early 2029 with a capacity equivalent to more than 250 million PET bottles a year, to be turned into raw material for the textile industry. EUWID put the capacity at around 45,000 tonnes a year, and Garbo published the news on its own site on 20 November 2025.

Saipem's project page sets out the remaining steps: planning, permitting and financial close in 2026 and 2027, detailed engineering in 2027 and 2028, and construction in 2028 and 2029. No public source found confirms that the CINEA grant agreement has been signed or that financial close has been reached.

The Money

Garbo's filed accounts are not free to read, and the two public summaries disagree sharply. CompanyReports gives 2024 revenue of €29,321,635, a net profit of €341,473, personnel costs of €3,453,799 and a staff band of 50 to 99. Creditsafe lists turnover of €924,782 for its latest filing, labelled 2025. The gap cannot be resolved without the filed accounts, so no revenue chart is shown here.

Chempet S.r.l., the vehicle for the technology, is small. CompanyReports gives it 2024 revenue of €1,279, a net loss of €263,373 and personnel costs of €30,582, with share capital of €126,529 according to the ChemPET website. No licensing income from the technology is visible in these figures.

Garbo has drawn on EU research funding before. It was a partner in the Horizon 2020 Eco-Solar Factory project from 2015 to 2018, with €248,375 to recover silicon lost when solar wafers are sawn. The ChemPET award was grant only; no investment by the EIC Fund in Garbo or Chempet has been reported.

Why Europe Should Care

EU law now forces demand for recycled PET. The Single-Use Plastics Directive requires PET beverage bottles to contain at least 25% recycled plastic from 2025 and all plastic beverage bottles 30% from 2030, as summarised by Plastics Engineering. Mechanical recycling cannot turn coloured, multilayer or textile PET waste into food-grade material, the CORDIS report says. A process that turns that waste into virgin-grade feedstock would ease the supply and cut Europe's use of fossil-based terephthalic acid and glycol, which is the case the CORDIS project summary makes.

The Verdict

Garbo has not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records, company statements and EU project data, linked throughout.