At just 18, Jacob Nathan turned a secondary school science project into a business that has raised more than £37.2 million to tackle one of fashion's biggest environmental challenges: recycling nylon.
Nathan, who spent his teenage years protesting outside Parliament, sometimes skipping lessons to do so, found bacteria capable of living off plastic as their only food source during a project at the American School in London. He spent his gap year developing the idea, which became Epoch Biodesign, founded in 2019.
From gap year to full-time business
Despite his parents thinking the gap year was a diversion before university, Nathan declined his place at the University of Chicago to study biochemistry and economics and now runs the company full-time. The firm employs 54 people in London and 58 in Spain.
Epoch Biodesign is backed by Inditex, owner of Zara, and sportswear brand Lululemon. Its research operation sits 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," citing strong investors and the ability to attract global talent.
Enzymes and AI in the lab
The company is developing enzymes — proteins that speed up chemical reactions — 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 is cheap and widely used but notoriously tricky to recover from blended fabrics, so materials made from it often end up in scrap heaps or incinerators.
Epoch uses AI models to understand patterns in protein sequences and suggest promising enzyme candidates to be tested in its London labs. Tinkering with the amino acid "recipe" can alter what an enzyme does, and AI helps narrow the practically limitless options.
Scaling up across Europe
Epoch is already processing "tonnes" of waste in London but plans to go much further. In July, it acquired a shuttered chemicals plant near Girona in Spain as part of its plan to scale enzymatic plastic recycling. A separate facility in North Acton will test the recycling production on a bigger scale.
The company hopes to have a full-scale commercial recycling facility somewhere in Europe by 2030, turning waste nylon into new ingredients for reuse. So far, the process is not yet cost-competitive compared to making nylon from fossil fuels, but as production scales up and AI advances, that could change — and with oil prices fluctuating, Nathan claims his method is more reliable on cost.
Nathan reckons the same approach could eventually 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."
