10/30/2020 Can Waterless Dyeing Processes Clean Up the Clothing Industry?

- Yale E360

Yale Environment 360

Can Waterless Dyeing Processes Clean Up the Clothing

Industry?
One of the world’s most polluting industries is the textile-dyeing sector, which in China and
other Asian nations releases trillions of liters of chemically tainted wastewater. But new
waterless dyeing technologies, if adopted on a large scale, could sharply cut pollution from the
clothing industry.
BY LYDIA H EI DA • JUN E 12, 2014
Each year, one global industry gulps down trillions of liters of fresh water, together
with massive amounts of chemicals. e wastewater from that industry is then
dumped, often untreated, into rivers that bring its toxic content to the sea, where it
spreads around the globe.

e industry in question? e textile dyeing sector, whose colorful products belie the
reality that it is an egregious polluter, especially in China, which by some estimates
produces — and then discharges — roughly 40 percent of all dyeing chemicals
worldwide.

Now, new waterless dyeing technologies

are being developed and deployed that
could help reduce the vast quantities of
pollution generated by textile dyeing. In
recent years, three companies have each
developed a largely waterless dyeing
technology. Two are American
enterprises — AirDye and ColorZen —
and the third is a Dutch company,
Textile dyeing produces trillions of liters of DyeCoo, whose process is being used by
wastewater each year, especially in China. LU Adidas, one of its partners.
GUANG/GREENPEACE
Although the three processes are very
different from each other, the results are much the same. e use of water is cut to
near-zero, sharply diminishing pollution. e quantity of chemicals is drastically
reduced, while faster dyeing cycles lead to a major drop in energy consumption.

Still, despite these benefits, major questions remain as to whether these new
technologies will be able to turn the tide in the struggle to reduce pollution in the
textile industry. Water has been used to dye fabric for centuries, and textile firms have
generally been reluctant to embrace change. New waterless dyeing machines also are
expensive to install and the technologies often can only be used with certain kinds of
cloth, such as polyester.

“As for ColorZen, this is actually a new application of a technology that has been
around for over twenty years, and it has still not been accepted by the textile

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industry,” said professor Long Lin of the University of Leeds, a leading center of textile
technology and color science.

‘ e dyeing industry has made the cloth beautiful

but turned the clean water black,’ says a Chinese
official.

e need to reform the textile-dyeing industry is urgent, especially in China,

Bangladesh, India, Vietnam, and ailand.

China’s textile industry discharges about 2.5 trillion liters of wastewater into its rivers
annually, according to a 2012 report from the non-profit Institute of Public &
Environmental Affairs (IPE). Among these wastes are many hazardous chemicals —
tributyltin (TBT), pentabromodiphenyl ether (PBDE), phthalates, perfluorooctane
sulphonate (PFOS), and aniline — that are banned or strictly regulated in other
countries because they are toxic, persistent, bio-accumulative, hormone disruptive,
and can cause cancer.

“ e dyeing industry has made the cloth beautiful but [turned] the clean water black,”
Sunyun Yao, a country deputy secretary in Shaoxing County, China, said in 2010 at the
start of operation Green Storm, which fined or closed down companies illegally
discharging untreated wastewater. More than 30 percent of China’s dyeing houses are
located in Shaoxing.

According to 2012 statistics from China’s Ministry of Supervision, water pollution

accidents in all industrial sectors have risen to more than 1,700 annually — about five a
day. But this is not the main concern, says Ma Jun, one of China’s leading
environmentalists and founder of the IPE, which created the China Water Pollution
Map.

“ ese toxic spills are emergency situations, but the daily discharge of hazardous
substances is by itself already an ongoing disaster,” Ma said. “Some suppliers of brands
such as Ralph Lauren, Abercrombie & Fitch, Hugo Boss, and Victoria Secret are very
bad polluters, but these brands do not want to face this issue of pollution in their
supply chain. is is, in my view, totally irresponsible.”

e intensifying development of waterless dyeing processes has the potential to

change things if the technologies are adopted on a large scale, textile experts say.

DyeCoo’s machines use carbon dioxide, which is heated and heavily compressed so it
becomes supercritical, a state between a gas and a liquid. It then acts as a solvent and a
solute at the same time. As a result, color pigments penetrate much more quickly into
textile fibers and no chemicals or salts are needed. Since the dyeing time is cut in half
and fabric comes dry out of the machine, energy use is reduced by 50 percent,
according to DyeCoo’s former CEO Reinier Mommaal.

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Crucially, there is no wastewater discharge. After each batch is dyed, only a handful of
residue remains, consisting mainly of color pigments and oil.

One hurdle is the expense of waterless dyeing

machines, which can cost up to $4 million apiece.

About 95 percent of the carbon dioxide can be recycled and used again in the
machines, said Mommaal. Using less energy and chemicals means that, in the end, the
DyeCoo process brings production costs down by about 30 to 50 percent, the company
says. At the moment, the Yeh Group in ailand is using DyeCoo’s machines to
produce clothes for Adidas, and Far Eastern New Century in Taiwan utilizes these
machines to manufacture clothes for Nike.

AirDye has taken a different direction. Its cloth is no longer dipped in the traditional
bath filled with water and dye, but put into printing machines. Pressure and heat are
used to transfer specially formulated dyes from paper onto polyester fabric. “ e
molecule of the dye is attached to the molecule of the fiber, which gives a more lasting
color,” according to Rita Kant, assistant professor at the Institute of Fashion
Technology at Panjab University in India.

is process is faster than the traditional one and also uses 95 percent less water and
86 percent less energy, according to AirDye.

ColorZen has developed a method that changes the molecular composition of cotton
fibers, making it more receptive to dye. After treatment, the dyeing process uses 90
percent less water, 95 percent fewer chemicals, 75 percent less energy, and half as
much dye as conventional processes, according to the company.

But widespread adoption of waterless dyeing technologies faces some daunting

hurdles.

Ajoy Sarkar, an associate professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology and

Vocational Development in New York City, says that pre-treatment of fabrics raises
costs, as do logistical issues. “ColorZen has one location in China, which means that
companies have to transport their fibers to this facility, have it treated, and then
transported to a yarn plant to have it spun,” said Sarkar.

AirDye has five licensed operations — Coco Prints, Eco Prints, and Tex Prints, among
others — in the United States, Europe, and Asia, which also necessitates transporting
fabrics long distances to facilities using the waterless process. e company filed for
bankruptcy last year but is still operational under new owners.

China’s textile dyeing industry has taken off as major

international corporations opened clothing factories
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there.

Although DyeCoo’s and AirDye’s processes has proven to be successful, they can only
be used now for polyester, not cotton.

Experts like Sarkar say another major hurdle to expansion is the cost of waterless
dyeing machines,. DyeCoo’s machines cost $2.5 million to $4 million dollar apiece, for
example. “ e price per unit has to fall substantially,” comments Sarkar. “Otherwise
only companies with deep pockets like Nike or Adidas will be able to make such
investments, but not the majority of industry … Nevertheless I am excited. is is the
first innovation in dyeing that uses absolutely no water and that is a big advance.”

China’s textile dyeing industry has taken off in the last several decades as major
international corporations opened clothing factories there. at shift also outsourced
the water pollution problem.

As the price of clothing imported to the United States dropped 25 percent in the last
two decades, Asian textile mills often slashed costs by simply discharging untreated
wastewater into rivers.

is has resulted in severe land and water degradation around textile clusters,
according to various reports from Greenpeace, the Chinese Institute of Public &
Environmental Affairs (IPE), World Wildlife Fund, and the Swiss Federal Institute of
Aquatic Science and Technology.

e bigger picture is even bleaker. Apart from dye houses, the industrial belt along
major Chinese rivers like the Yangtze and the Pearl includes chemical plants,
petroleum refineries, nuclear fuel processing plants, metal smelters, and electric
equipment producers.

“It is breathtaking to see how bad it looks,” says Ake Bergman, an expert on hormone-
disrupting chemicals and a professor at Stockholm University and at Tongji
University in Shanghai. Bergman and his colleagues are monitoring the discharges in
the Yangtze River, which receives around 30 trillion liters of wastewater every year,
much of it untreated.

Exposure risks to hazardous chemicals will always be highest in manufacturing areas,

says Daniel Fagin, a science journalism professor at New York University. But Fagin —
author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book Toms River, about a cancer cluster in a New
Jersey town linked to the discharge of hazardous substances by a chemical plant — also
says that “such exposure is not confined to a town that has a chemical plant. It is
everywhere. We need to come up with intelligent ways of measuring that risk and
responding to it.”

Chemicals from dyeing are spread worldwide by

exporting clothes with residues on them.
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Chemicals from textile dyeing are also spread in a very different way — by importing
clothes with chemical residues on them. Friends of the Earth, World Wildlife Fund,
and Greenpeace have each tested a large variety of clothes that proved to contain
hazardous chemicals, such as aniline, phthalates, and nonylphenol ethoxylates
(NPE’s). All-weather jackets, wrinkle-free clothing, and t-shirts with plasticized prints
were found to be particularly infused with chemicals used in dyeing, finishing, and
waterproofing.

“ e vast majority of these chemicals are washed out in a single wash and end up in
our waterways,” says Kevin Brigden, a chemist working at Greenpeace Research
Laboratories in the United Kingdom. “If you look at the total amount of clothing
being sold per country, tens or hundreds of tons of chemicals that have been banned
from being used in European clothing manufacturing are imported in this way.”

e Chinese government has announced a $320 billion plan to tackle water pollution.
New standards for wastewater discharges from the textile dyeing industry have been
set, including limits on the amount of fresh water used to produce each ton of fabric.
Whether these laws will be enforced at the local level remains a major question.

Bangladesh, a large textile exporter, is grappling with its own problems related to
water use in the dyeing process. Each year, the water table of Dhaka, the capital of
Bangladesh drops by one to two meters, in part because of water use in the textile
industry. In neighboring India, the government has closed hundreds of small textile-
dyeing plants because they failed to meet court-ordered mandates to achieve zero
liquid discharge.

Waterless dyeing companies say their technologies have resulted in a significant

reduction in water use and pollution. Last year, for example, Adidas announced that
by using one million yards of DryDye fabric, the company was able to save 25 million
liters of water. Still, these savings are just a small fraction of the estimated annual 6
trillion liters of fresh water currently used by the global textile industry.

For waterless dyeing technology to be widely adopted, the price of the dyeing
machines must come down substantially, according to the University of Leeds’ Long
Lin.

“ e industry will never accept such new technology unless it is cheap enough,” says
Lin. “ e dye industry is typically a very low-margin industry, which is unfortunate
because now the only way to make money is to abuse the environment.”

Lydia Heida is an independent journalist and photographer based in the Netherlands. She specializes in covering recycling,
renewable energy, and resources such as water and fossil fuels. Her articles and images have been published, among other
places, in de Volkskrant newspaper, Professional Engineering magazine, and Spektrum der Wissenschaft. MORE →

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