SBIR Phase II: Establishing Manufacturing Standards for Textile-Derived Recycled Polyester Feedstock

The broader/commercial impact of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project is the manufacturing of a highly desired but unavailable material for the textile industry: textile-derived rPET feedstock. Driven by regulatory and customer pressure, the textile industry will require at least ~15,000 MT per year of rPET from 2025 onward, a potential $22.5B market. Most valuable is textile-derived rPET, in which clothing feedstock is made from clothing waste. Despite strong demand, this product is currently unavailable for purchase due to technical challenges. The proposed technology is a patent-pending, low-cost wash process that transforms mixed textile waste into purified feedstock at cost parity with virgin material. Along with the ability to remove elastane (a common barrier for textile recycling), the technology’s ultra-low cost provides a durable competitive advantage as a ‘green’ product that does not demand a ‘green premium’. This proposal bridges a critical gap toward bringing this technology from bench-top to market via the development of downstream manufacturing processes and quality standards for textile-derived recycled materials. This project enables an initial market offering of 1 ton/month, providing a critical milestone toward construction 1-3 full commercial scale plants by 2030 and recycling 450,000 tons of waste textiles per year. This Small Business Innovation Research Phase II project enables production of textile-derived recycled polyester feedstock, a highly desired but unavailable material for textile manufacturing. Textile recycling is an immature industry limited by a lack of technical solutions for complex material challenges - circular textile recycling, in which textile waste is captured and transformed into re-usable feedstock, currently accounts for less than 1% of total mass flow of textiles. Among the most significant challenges is the ability to successfully transform complex mixtures of multiple fiber types into a single-component feedstock. Our novel process is a transformational technology for polyester recycling, capable of removing contaminants such as elastane, dyes, and other additives from mixed fiber polyester (PET) textile waste, resulting in pure, undyed polyester raw materials. This Phase II project enables the transformation of this intermediate material into market-ready feedstock by examining the critical material features that contribute quality metrics by which the market evaluates and selects feedstock products. The completion of this grant will represent a significant milestone toward our goal to divert over 150,000 tons of textile waste annually from landfills, facilitating a truly circular economy for synthetic textiles, and providing enhanced supply chain security with sustainable materials for apparel. 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.