Textile Students Honored

Three textile engineering students were awarded third place in the 2012 Odebrecht Award for Sustainable Development. Richard Figueroa, Nicole Santos and Monica Golike’s project was based on their class assignment in Melissa Pasquinelli’s sustainability course last spring.

The project looked at the recyclability of oil-contaminated pizza boxes, which typically cannot be recycled. The students examined three different ways to recycle the boxes including adding a solvent to the recycling bath, using a bio-polymer coating on cardboard and using the contaminated cardboard as a recycled composite material for construction purposes. The students received $10,000 as well as some other excellent benefits and opportunities for their work. Read more.