SBIR Phase I: Secure Circular Economy for Textile Fiber Through Efficient Recovery of Cellulosic Raw Materials from Clothing Waste

SBIR第一阶段项目的更广泛影响是每年修复最终进入垃圾填埋场的1700万吨纺织废物。在服装行业现有的经济驱动力范围内，该项目旨在部署技术，使美国从浪费的零和线性原材料模式转变为有弹性的本地可持续循环经济。该项目将使城市和农村的当地社区能够从纺织废物中创造经济价值（原材料和就业机会），与往常相比，大幅减少碳足迹和温室气体排放。该项目将开发对美国纺织原材料市场的安全性和可持续性产生影响的技术，以分布式方式重新支撑一个行业，通过他们的服装购买选择影响每一个美国人。如果成功，美国将引领世界进入一个真正可持续的时尚循环经济的新时代。该项目旨在提高知识水平，开发核心技术，使纤维素纺织品回收在美国纺织制造业中得到广泛采用和商业化。通过利用聚合物科学和连续工艺设计的核心竞争力和创新模型，该项目将开发一种非破坏性的提取工艺，该工艺将在当地和国内将报废纺织品废物转化为高价值的纤维素循环经济原料，其质量与公斤级原始材料相同或更高。作为该项目的一部分，重点将是从含有其他污染成分的混合材料纺织废物中提取纤维素，这些污染成分通常会阻碍其回收利用。这种方法涉及创新的绿色化学混合物，能够快速提取棉花，纺制新型纤维，并有效回收工艺化学品。该项目将优化和进一步发展这一核心技术，并进行原型设计和工程设计，以实现从服装废料中提取可再生纤维素材料（棉花），并在多公斤规模上进行演示。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The broader impact of this SBIR Phase I project is to remediate the 17 million tons of textile waste that ends up in landfills annually. Working within the existing economic drivers of the clothing industry, this project aims to deploy technology that can profitably transition the USA away from a wasteful zero-sum linear raw materials model into a resilient local and sustainable circular economy. This project will enable local communities, urban and rural alike, to create economic value (raw materials and jobs) out of textile waste, with a drastic reduction in carbon footprint and greenhouse gas emissions compared to business as usual. This project will develop technology that has an impact on the security and sustainability of the US textile raw materials marketplace, by enabling a re-shoring of an industry in a distributed way that can affect every single American through their clothing purchasing options. If successful, the US could lead the world into a new era of a truly sustainable circular economy for fashion.This project aims to advance knowledge and develop the core technologies required for widespread adoption and commercialization of cellulosic textile recycling within the American textile manufacturing industry. By leveraging core competencies and innovative models for polymer science and continuous process design, this project will develop a non-destructive extractive process that will locally and domestically convert end-of-life textile waste into high-value cellulosic circular economy feedstocks of equal or greater quality to virgin material at kilogram scale. As part of this project, the focus will be on extracting cellulose from mixed material textile waste that contain other contaminant components that often hinder its recycling. This approach involves innovative mixtures of green chemistry that enable the rapid extraction of cotton, the spinning of novel fibres, and the efficient recovery of the process chemicals. This project will optimise and further develop this core technology and conduct the prototyping and engineering design required for reproducible cellulosic material (cotton) extraction from clothing waste and its demonstration at multi-kg scale.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.