Sustainable bleaching chemicals for textiles

Textile yarn and fabric pre-processing require energy, water, and chemicals. Hydrogen peroxide and alkali utilized in the scouring and bleaching process.

Any reduction of these, or replacing them with more eco-friendly chemicals will enhance the sustainability of textile processing.

Stakeholders

EHS professionals

Production professionals

Testing and standards professionals

Textile chemicals professionals

Textile laundry and maintenance professionals

Vital Stats

How does it work? Bleaching, a process of whitening fabric by removal of natural colour, such as the tan of linen, is usually carried out by means of chemicals selected according to the chemical composition of the fibre. Conventionally, alkali and hydrogen peroxide are utilised in the scouring and bleaching process.	Sustainability benefits Environmental sustainability - Using sustainable chemicals instead of alkali and peroxides could enhance the water efficiency of the process. By having less pollutants in the resulting waste water, the energy, costs and efforts for waste water treatment are also reduced.
Highlights/USP	Stage of commercialization Early commercialization
Types of professionals who can improve the solution Production professionals, Chemical engineers	Specifically relevant to any geography? Countries that are involved in yarn and fabric production
Decarbonization Potential Low-moderate	Value Chain Textile yarn ,

Carbon Focus

Solutions

Projects

Textile chemicals analysis as a part of life cycle assessment - a case study in Sweden

Innovation

Launchpad

Green reducing chemicals for textile dyeing

Topview

Debate

Over 1900 chemicals used in textile production, with 165 of them considered harmful

Library

Celebrate

Support Organisations

Web Resources

Inter-organizational collaboration for optimizing textile supply chains

This thesis employs multiple supply chain collaboration strategies to optimize existing textile supply chain models.

It has identified three supply chain collaboration strategies - a novel resource sharing mechanism for optimizing garment manufacturing echelon in the textile supply chain; a central order processing system for optimizing demand-driven textile supply chain; a collaborative cloud service platform for optimizing make-to-order textile supply chain.

Sustainable sourcing at scale

This McKinsey report consists of surveys that reflect the perspectives of 64 participating sourcing executives, who are responsible for a total sourcing value of over USD 100 billion. This report presents respondents’ and interviewees’ outlooks on the future of apparel

sourcing, interwoven with McKinsey’s interpretation and experience.

Sustainable processes for pre-treatment of cotton fabric

This paper discusses a sustainable pretreatment process for cotton where attempts were made to reutilize the unexhausted 92.7 % alkali and 93.1 % hydrogen peroxide from the scouring and bleaching process. After recycling the scouring and bleaching process

bath three times, effluent still contained 55 % alkali and 67.5 % hydrogen peroxide which was reused to resize a new grey fabric. The fabric properties like Tegewa rating, absorbency, and whiteness were found to be better than the conventional enzyme designed fabric.