SBIR/STTR Award attributes
The technologies for recycling plastic waste already exist, but they are not available in a form that is suitable for expeditionary deployment. Geofabrica therefore proposes to adapt existing recycling technology to achieve the mobility and robustness needed to be deployed at FOBs and to enable operation with limited power and water with little burden to the Warfighter. In Phase I, Geofabrica proposes to build and test a simple sortation prototype. Sortation is key to the Mobile Recycling Facility (MRF-X) success as, once an adequately pure fraction of plastic material has been recovered, it is relatively straightforward to extrude 3D printing filament. Geofabrica will also create a high-level design framework to address the strategies central to target material recovery, energy minimization, resource consumption, robustness and mobility that are essential to an expeditionary capability. Phase I will validate Geofabrica’s MRF-X strategy and will provide 1) a foundation for assessing the viability of Phase II, 2) a framework for planning the Phase II development of an MRF-X end-to-end prototype, and 3) a basis for developing the MRF-X commercialization plan.
