Life cycle assessment-based strategy for non-freeze-dried aerogel from waste textiles and its application in solar water purification

Recycling waste textiles into high-value materials is essential for the circular economy, yet the environmental costs of such processes are often overlooked. This study presents a sustainable material development approach guided by Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), successfully converting waste cotton/spandex blends into high-performance aerogels. The LCA framework first identified chemical pretreatment as a major environmental concern, and comparative analysis revealed that complex pretreatments yield marginal performance gains while significantly increasing environmental burden, guiding the selection of a simplified, pretreatment-free route. Within this pathway, LCA further highlighted freeze-drying as a critical hotspot, accounting for 97.3% of energy consumption. To address this, an ambient-pressure drying strategy based on Ca 2+ -mediated in situ coordination crosslinking was developed, strengthening the gel network to resist capillary forces and replacing energy-intensive freeze-drying. This eco-design strategy reduces damage to human health and ecosystems by 60.5% and 62.6%, respectively, compared to the conventional CCA-PEI (Liu et al., 2022 (3)) route. The resulting aerogel, integrated with carbon nanotubes as a solar evaporator, achieved an evaporation rate of 1.34 kg·m −2 ·h −1 with >99% removal of salt ions and organic dyes. This work establishes both a sustainable aerogel fabrication pathway and a rational, LCA-informed framework for environmentally responsible material design.