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

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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.