SBIR Phase I: High-Purity Extraction of PET from Carpet Waste

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This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) project will enable the recycling of valuable materials from complex wastes that today cannot be recovered. The commercial impact from this innovation is to allow for complex waste streams that contain multiple materials, such as carpets and textiles, to serve as the source of raw materials for the manufacture of new goods in a way that is cost advantaged. This gives those businesses that use such raw materials a sustainable alternative and, a lower-cost, efficiently produced material. In this way, there will be significant incentive for the reuse of thousands of tons of material that today either goes to landfills, oceans, or is incinerated for energy- a very low value application. The project will yield an entirely new framework for recycling of complex, multi-component materials. This project will develop novel technologies for fractionating complex wastes. Multi-component wastes such as carpets and textiles represent upwards of 4% of total landfill volume. Today, there does not exist technology for recovering the high-value materials that are in these wastes. The proposed project intends to develop a new approach using chemical techniques as opposed to simple melt recycling, to enable the value-added recycling of high value polymers from such wastes. Chemical process development will take place in order to take the current status of the technology to a status that is ready for implementation in a pilot plant. The main technical objective is to develop the process for production of consistent, high purity product. Materials such as polyester and nylon currently cannot be separated from natural or cellulosic fibers such as cotton or even heavily cross-linked rubbers as those that are found in carpet. The goals of the research are to develop the proposers' current process for fractionating the nylons and polyesters with an emphasis on achieving high purity products for reuse. To this end, various solution processing techniques will be investigated for exclusion of impurities from end product polymer.