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

这个小型企业创新研究(SBIR)项目将能够从今天无法回收的复杂废物中回收有价值的材料。这项创新的商业影响是，允许含有多种材料的复杂废物流，如地毯和纺织品，以成本优势的方式作为制造新商品的原材料来源。这为那些使用这种原材料的企业提供了一个可持续的替代方案，以及一种成本更低、生产效率更高的材料。通过这种方式，将极大地鼓励重复使用数千吨材料，这些材料今天要么被送往垃圾填埋场、海洋，要么被焚烧成能源--这是一种非常低价值的应用。该项目将为复杂、多组分材料的回收提供一个全新的框架。该项目将开发复杂废物分级的新技术。地毯和纺织品等多种成分的废物占总填埋量的4%以上。今天，不存在回收这些废物中的高价值材料的技术。拟议的项目旨在开发一种使用化学技术的新方法，而不是简单的熔融回收，以实现从这些废物中回收高价值聚合物的增值。将进行化学工艺开发，以使该技术的当前状态达到可在试验厂实施的状态。主要的技术目标是开发生产一致的、高纯度产品的工艺。目前，聚酯和尼龙等材料无法从天然纤维或纤维素纤维(如棉花)中分离出来，甚至不能像地毯中发现的那样与高度交联的橡胶分离。这项研究的目标是开发提出者目前对尼龙和聚酯进行分级的工艺，重点是获得高纯度的产品以供重复使用。为此，将研究各种溶液处理技术，以排除最终产品聚合物中的杂质。

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.