The technology
We learned to make things. We are only starting to learn to unmake them
A product is a set of materials, each one chosen for what it does, bonded together so the product lasts. That bonding is what makes it durable, and at end of life it is what makes it a mixture. Where the materials separate cleanly we can already recover them. Where they do not, which is the reality in most cases, what comes back is worth less than what went in.
Why it is hard
Force cannot tell one bond from another
Taking something apart means acting on one bond and leaving the others alone. Heat cannot tell a crosslink from a polymer chain. Neither can pressure, friction, or chemistry that attacks whatever it reaches. Every route that opens a material by force acts wherever it lands, and what comes back is a blend.
The piece breaks
The material comes down in size, and everything deeper starts from what this step leaves. The fracture crosses backbone and crosslink alike, taking whatever lies in its path, and the network either side of it is untouched.
- Polymer and filler
- Still together
The crosslinks break
The crosslinks that lock the network into one insoluble solid are broken, and every backbone survives whole. The network is open, which is as far as a material can be taken apart without breaking the chains themselves.
- Polymer and filler
- Still together
The backbones break
The backbones are broken along their length. The polymer is thermally decomposed, and what leaves is a carbon solid alongside gas and oil. What survives carries the structure and the contaminants the process gave it, not the ones it started with.
- Polymer and filler
- Still together
The platform
Targeted cleaving of the polymer
Selectivity is what biology does. An enzyme acts on one bond, at one point, and ignores everything else around it. Nature has been taking matter apart this way, and putting the parts back to use, for billions of years. It has never been pointed at the materials we make, because nature never met them: vulcanised rubber, cured composites and engineered thermoplastics were all invented inside the last two centuries.
So we point it at them. Other things can break these bonds, but nothing breaks them selectively. An engineered enzyme acts at defined points and leaves the rest of the material intact, which is what force cannot do. What is released is still the material that went in, so recovering it becomes a separation problem rather than another chemistry one.
So we design them. Kinfinity is three things built together, and we do not replace material chains. We solve the step that blocks one, and the industry applies it.
Analytics
What a material is, and where it can be cut.
Spatial molecular mapping and compound analysis, run on the real material rather than on a model of it. It answers two questions: what is actually in this sample, and did the cut we intended land. It is heavy work, a full study per material, so it is not a continuous readout.
Enzymes
Cut there, and nowhere else.
Engineered to act at defined points and leave the rest of the material intact.
Separation
Recover what comes free.
Recovering the parts once they are released is its own problem, and it is ours. We are building proprietary methods for it now.
In development
Analytics runs on more than one thing. It reads the blended material that devulcanisation hands over, and it is sold today to tyre developers who want to see how a brand-new compound behaves, which never touches a recovery line.
In practice
What an enzyme does to a rubber network
End-of-life tyres are the first material we have taken this to. Vulcanised rubber is a network of sulphur crosslinks tying polymer chains to each other, and opening that network without destroying what it holds is the step this technology solves. Getting individual materials back out of it takes two separate acts, and only the second one is biology.
- Polymer backbone
- Sulphur crosslink
- Recovered fragments
A vulcanised network
Vulcanisation ties the polymer backbone chains to each other with sulphur crosslinks. Those crosslinks are what make a tyre a tyre: one continuous, insoluble network that will not melt and will not dissolve.
Devulcanisation breaks the crosslinks
The sulphur bridges between chains are broken, and the network comes apart into free polymer chains. The chains themselves are left intact, which is the whole point: nothing of value has been destroyed to get here.
Enzymes cleave the chains
Engineered enzymes are designed to cut at defined points rather than at random. Where a thermal process breaks the polymer wherever heat happens to reach it, selectivity means the pieces are known before they are made.
Where we are
What we have shown, and what we have not
AKIN's proprietary enzyme variants have demonstrated breakdown of polyisoprene at benchtop scale. Work on end-of-life tyre material is ongoing.
Enzyme activity on polyisoprene standards, at benchtop scale
The reference material, in the laboratory. Not yet on tyre rubber itself.
Kinfinity Imaging is in commercial use
It is the part of the platform that already runs outside the laboratory.
Available since 2023 as Kinfinity Imaging
An improved enzyme variant has been developed
It is the variant that recovery at scale depends on.
Patent filed April 2026 · bench scale
Spatial molecular mapping, using MALDI-MSI, records a full mass spectrum at every point across a section and reassembles them into a map. The image here is a real result, on real end-of-life material.
MALDI-MSI: matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionisation mass spectrometry imaging, a technique that records a mass spectrum at every point across a sample surface.
The products
Two products carry this work
Kinfinity Recovery
Biorefinery and Separation
A rubber biorefinery that returns individual materials, built to attach to an existing devulcanisation plant.
Kinfinity Imaging
Analytics
Conventional analysis gives averages. This gives location: what sits inside a sample, and where.